Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not gold but only men can makeA people great and strong;Men who for truth and honors sakeStand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep,Who dare while others flyThey build a nations pillars deepAnd lift them to the sky.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘always do what you are afraid to do.’

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

New arts destroy the old.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.

If you shoot at a king you must kill him.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

It’s them as take advantage that get advantage I this world.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

If in doubt, don’t. If still in doubt, do what’s right.

It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.

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

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails – aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

He has the deed half done who has made a beginning.