Ralph Waldo Emerson

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

Whatever limits us we call fate.

I didn’t find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

A man is a god in ruins.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.