Ralph Waldo Emerson

Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness – an open and noble temper.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent – for every effect a perfect cause – and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.

Not gold but only men can makeA people great and strong;Men who for truth and honors sakeStand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep,Who dare while others flyThey build a nations pillars deepAnd lift them to the sky.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find we have lost the future.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men. And the one makes a better subject for contemplation than the other.

Say what you have to say and first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending; sit down.

Truth is the summit of being justice is the application of it to affairs.

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

If thou art clean and warm, it is sufficient; for more doth but rob the Poor, and please the Wanton.