Ralph Waldo Emerson

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come, I’ll sit up and sing.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

He that does good for good’s sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is in flames.

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

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

To solve a problem or to reach a goal, you don’t need to know all the answers in advance. But you must have a clear idea of the problem or the goal you want to reach.

I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my fathers house to believe in democracy. Trust the peoplethat was his message.

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

I don’t like needing anyone for anything.