Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

Thought makes every thing fit for use.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Sorrow makes us children again.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

When you’re first figuring yourself out, you care so much about what people think of you.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

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.

I always like people who have developed long and hard, particularly through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think that what they arrive at is, usually, deeper and more beautiful than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning.

To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

If a man’s fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket; a very few names may be considered as perpetual lamps that shine unconsumed.

There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world. Alas! it is the hush of suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen! No, listen carefully, I think I hear somethingyes, there it was quite clear. Dont you hear it? It is the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the paradegrounds, splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two million German soldiers and more than a million Italiansgoing on maneuversyes, only on maneuvers!

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.