Ralph Waldo Emerson

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

Men are respectable only as they respect.

Be humble. It becomes a creature, a depending and borrowed being, that lives not of itself, but breathes in another’s air with another’s breath, and is accountable for every moment of time and can call nothing its own, but is absolutely a tenant at will of the great Lord of heaven and earth.

Why is that others have so much faith in me, while I have so little? Why can’t I have the same belief in me that they have? Why can’t I see in myself, what they do? What is it that makes me, hold myself back? How many more hurdles do I need to overcome? There are so many questions that I have to find the answers to. And I will only find them by focusing and being completely honest with myself.

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

Failure is success if we learn from it.

Big doors swing on little hinges.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

A sudden bold and unexpected question does many times surprise a man and lay him open.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?