Ralph Waldo Emerson

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness – an open and noble temper.

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.

No matter how often you are defeated, you are born to victory.

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don’t say it.

They say that history repeats itself, so if you don’t learn from the past you will make the same mistakes. So I have become an archaeologist of my own history. Digging up what has long since been buried, exhuming those forgotten fragments. Trying to distinguish what is real from folklore, trying to gain understanding, rather than relying on myths.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

The eagle has ceased to scream, but the parrots will now begin to chatter. The war of the giants is over and the pigmies will now start to squabble.

Nothing does Reason more Right, than the Coolness of those that offer it: for Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.