Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

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

Every mind has a choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.

See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

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

I believe that every person is born with talent.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.

Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

Preaching is the expression of moral sentiments applied to the duties of life.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

To know fulfillment, nourish what is for the belly and not the eye.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.