Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.

Already know you that which you need.

No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.

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

Equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying the whole way to hell.

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

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars Englandhe should have said Britain, of coursealways wins one battlethe last.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.