Ralph Waldo Emerson

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

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

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

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and new.

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as mortals.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.

Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real center of the household.

We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass.

No comment is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.

The connection between us runs so strong and deep. It’s like a steel cable stretching across the ocean bed, so many fathoms below, that even the most skilled and courageous of deep sea divers cannot reach it to cut it. It remains strong, silent, invisible, invincible.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.