Ralph Waldo Emerson

• A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
• A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
• A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends
• Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
• All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.
• Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
• Before we acquire great power, we must acquire wisdom to use it well.
• Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; Unbelief, in denying them.
• Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.
• Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
• Do not be too timid and squeamish about your reactions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
• Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.
• Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
• Do not waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
• Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.
• Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.
• Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
• Go put your creed into the deed. Nor speak with double tongue.
• Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.
• Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed.
• Great are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.
• Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.
• I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
• If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
• If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.
• Imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.
• In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
• Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
• It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
• It is only when the mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen.
• Life is a progress, and not a station.
• Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood.
• Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.
• Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
• Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.
• Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
• Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
• Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
• Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
• Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
• Our distrust is very expensive.
• Our strength grows out of our weaknesses.
• Self-trust is the first secret of success.
• Skill to do comes of doing.
• So is cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more remains.
• The earth laughs in flowers.
• The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
• The only way to have a friend is to be one.
• The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
• The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.
• The years teach much which the days never know.
• Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
• To be great is to be misunderstood.
• To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
• To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
• Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
• Truth, and goodness, and beauty are but different faces of the same all.
• We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
• We are wiser than we know.
• We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
• We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.
• What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
• When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
• Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.