Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.

We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

All mankind love a lover.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

Knowledge always demands increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but will afterwards always propagate itself.

Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand — relax!

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.

Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy – but he who has shown the better temper.

The men who have furnished me with my greatest inspiration have not been men of wealth, but men of deeds.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.