Ralph Waldo Emerson

I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.

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.

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

Our own life has to be our message.

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars Englandhe should have said Britain, of coursealways wins one battlethe last.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.

As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.

It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgment.

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbors about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.

Plan backwards as well as forward. Set objectives and trace back to see how to achieve them. You may find that no path can get you there. Plan forward to see where your steps will take you, which may not be clear or intuitive.

We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.