Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep. Who dare while others fly.They build a nation’s pillars deep. And lift them to the sky.

The years teach much what the days never knew.

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him.

Friends… they cherish one another’s hopes. They are kind to one another’s dreams.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

It were better to be of no church, than to be bitter for any.

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.

Woman is a ray of God. She is not that earthly beloved: she is creative, not created.