Ralph Waldo Emerson

A sect or party is an incognito devised to save man from the vexation of thinking.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

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.

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

Round numbers are always false.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

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.

Rarely promise, but, if lawful, constantly perform.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree. We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

As the physically weak man can make himself strong by careful and patient training, so the man of weak thoughts can make them strong by exercising himself in right thinking.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

For the most important decisions in your life, trust your intuition, and then work with everything you have, to prove it right.

No matter how often you are defeated, you are born to victory.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail, toil, envy, want, and patron.

How hard you work matters more than how much you make.

Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him.

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.