Ralph Waldo Emerson

The god of victory is said to be one-handed, but peace gives victory on both sides.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us.

The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

I’ll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they’ve stopped caring.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.

None of us should be defined by the worst thing we’ve ever done.

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.

There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.