Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you?

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

The more experiments you make the better.

Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.

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

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.

How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?

We bust build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.

He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father’s care.

Appearances matter – and remember to smile.

To keep your secret is wisdom, but to expect others to keep it is folly.

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

While fools shun one set of faults they run into the opposite one.

There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less an exception to the general rule.

We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates.