Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Knowledge exists to be imparted.

The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.

A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

Be virtuous and you will be eccentric.

Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

We live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.