Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

The surest poison is time.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

Anger makes dull men witty – but it keeps them poor.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

If we want maturity, we have to be mature. If we want a nation that feels hopeful, then we have to speak in hopeful terms… We have to model what we want.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.

A jay hasnt got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.