Ralph Waldo Emerson

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves…

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.

There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world. Alas! it is the hush of suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen! No, listen carefully, I think I hear somethingyes, there it was quite clear. Dont you hear it? It is the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the paradegrounds, splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two million German soldiers and more than a million Italiansgoing on maneuversyes, only on maneuvers!

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.

The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.

Have a care, therefore, where there is more sail than ballast.

Every time I think I have reached the peak, I look up and see I still have a ways to go. But I look back and see just how far I have come.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

At 70 years old, if I could give my younger self one piece of advice, It would be to use the phrase ‘f**k off’ much more frequently.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

Youth gets together with their materials to build a bridge to the moon or maybe a palace on earth; then in middle age they decide to build a woodshed with them instead.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake . . . by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.

We run to win, not just to be in the race.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

The quieter you become, you more you are able to hear.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.