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.

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

The key to every man is his thought. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.

Any government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where the law rules, and the people are a party to those laws, and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.