Ralph Waldo Emerson

A true friend is somebody who can make us do what we can.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

There is a crack in everything God has made.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

I wish for you the wisdom to realize that forgiveness has nothing to do with an apology.

Better is the enemy of good.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marryA young man not yet, an elder man not at all.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.

The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.

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

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying the whole way to hell.

Work is life, you know, and without it, there’s nothing but fear and insecurity.

Life gives nothing to man without labor.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.