Ralph Waldo Emerson

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.

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

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

All mankind love a lover.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

Religion is nothing else but love of God and man.

They are decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

We need much less than we think we need.

I don’t like needing anyone for anything.

Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

Standing beneath this immense, bejeweled, star-spangled dome, breathing in its life, boundaries fall away, possibilities open up and my wings unfold. And I thought that you were the one who was the angel.

Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there.

Fortune knocks at every man’s door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.