Ralph Waldo Emerson

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

That man is idle who can do something better.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one’s self-approval.

If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all. [Ut haec ipsa qui non sentiat deorum vim habere is nihil omnino sensurus esse videatur.]

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

If you have inner peace, nobody can force you to be a slave to the outer reality.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.

Some people are stuck on who I was that who I am never even had a chance.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Haven’t you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches.

I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips.

What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?

No just cause is futile, even if it’s lost, if it helps make the future better than the past.

Nothing does more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.