Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is short, but there is always time for courtesy.

Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe… the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

Consequences are unpitying.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Amuse not thy self therefore with the numerous Opinions of the World, nor value thy self upon verbal Orthodoxy, Philosophy, or thy Skill in Tongues, or Knowledge of the Fathers; (too much the Business and Vanity of the World). But in this rejoyce, That thou knowest God, that is the Lord, who exerciseth loving Kindness, and Judgment; and Righteousness in the Earth.

People sleep, and when they die they wake.

Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

Self-command is the main discipline.

The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only – not from its privileged classes.

The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?