Ralph Waldo Emerson

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and new.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marryA young man not yet, an elder man not at all.

The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction.

The surest poison is time.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.