Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

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.

Your mind makes a cruel master, but a generous servant.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

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

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

Don’t be a hard rock when you really are a gem!

He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.