Ralph Waldo Emerson

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Money often costs too much.

Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.

Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

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

Dharma is what the Buddha taught. It is the way of understanding and love-how to understand, how to love, how to make understanding and love into real things.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

None of the affections have been noted to fascinate and bewitch but envy.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

A home without a cat-and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat-may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

There is a wisdom of the head, and there is a wisdom of the heart.

Beware what you set your heart upon. For it shall surely be yours.

It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.