Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it… Beware of me, it says, but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sun beams and you will always look lovely!

The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

A home without a cat-and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat-may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

We bust build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

He shines in the second rank, who is eclipsed in the first.

Any government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where the law rules, and the people are a party to those laws, and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.