Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Society is a hospital of incurables.

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

You must learn to drink the cup of life as it comes … without stirring it up from the bottom. That’s where the bitter dregs are!

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.