Ralph Waldo Emerson

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.

He has the deed half done who has made a beginning.

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

Look to make your course regular, that men may know beforehand what they may expect.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

Every one goes astray, but the least imprudent are they who repent the soonest.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

The Public is merely a multiplied “me”.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

The never-ending task of self improvement.

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.