Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some of your grief you have cured, and lived to survive; but what torments of pain have you endured that haven’t as yet arrived.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

Beauty rests on necessities.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

Anger is short madness

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

The truest end of life is to know that life never ends.

There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess and there are few errors they have ever avoided.

Winners never quit and quitters never win.

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.

The affairs of the world will go on forever. Do not delay the practice of meditation.

We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together, and if we are to live together we have to talk.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

This body of mine is my teacher. This heart of mine, my guide. My dear head struggles to make sense of it all whilst my hands gently remind me to trust and let go.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.