Ralph Waldo Emerson

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman – repose in energy.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

Drunkenness spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans man. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous, and mad.

Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.

He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. 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.

Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.