Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

A lucky person gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they’re about to do and thinks it still matters.

Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.

But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Say what you have to say and first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending; sit down.

Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist’s custom.

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?