Ralph Waldo Emerson

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Reality is a sliding door.

Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

What drives me to be who I am, to do all that I do, is not what words will be engraved for my epitaph. What drives me to be who I am, to do what I do, is not vanity, is not for adulation in the eyes of others. What drives me is my own desire to be better; to be happy. When I am dead and buried, the words above will not bring me back to life, I choose to live out my epitaph, and not just for it to be a collection of words someone has chosen to define me.

That strong mother doesn’t tell her cub ‘Son, stay weak so the wolves can get you’. She says, ‘Toughen up, this is reality we are living in’.

Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

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

Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

He looks the whole world in the face for he owes not any man.

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

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.