"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
"For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness."
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
"Always do what you are afraid to do."
"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."
"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."
"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."
"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."
"Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail."
"Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them."
"Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air."
"It is not the length of life, but the depth."
"The earth laughs in flowers."
"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
"Life is a journey, not a destination."
"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."
"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."
"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be."
"Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you."
"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer."
"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."
"The only way to have a friend is to be one."
"A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another."
"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience."
"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."
"Be silly. Be honest. Be kind."
"Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old."
"Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."
"Every artist was first an amateur."
"Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life."
"Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine."
"When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know."
"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."
"In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him."
"That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased."
"Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be."
"Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for."
"The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions."
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."
"He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses."
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
"Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not."
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
"Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow."
"Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God."
"It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself."
"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."
"There is creative reading as well as creative writing."
"A great man is always willing to be little."
"For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else."
"You are constantly invited to be what you are."
"All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients."
"Nothing external to you has any power over you."
"In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes."
"Love, and you shall be loved."
"Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain."
"Every wall is a door."
"Insist upon yourself. Be original."
"I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I must be myself."
"It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself."
"People only see what they are prepared to see."
"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."
"Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus."
"There are books . . . which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences."
"We are always getting ready to live but never living."
"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."
"Beauty without expression is boring."
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist."
"The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common."
"I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from."
"Fear always springs from ignorance."
"The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret."
"I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new."
"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule,equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
"A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic."
"Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn."
"Be good to your work, your word, and your friend."
"Tis the good reader that makes the good book."
"Beware what you set your heart upon. For it surely shall be yours."
"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."
"People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character."
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
"Thou art to me a delicious torment."
"Scatter joy!"
"The reward of a thing well done is having done it."
"Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good."
"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next."
"We boil at different degrees."
"We acquire the strength we have overcome."
"If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me."
"Hitch your wagon to a star."
"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
"No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it."
"Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion."
"There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat."
"Nature hates calculators."
"To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light."
"Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great."
"Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault."
"As we grow old...the beauty steals inward."
"I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all."
"The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic."
"Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."
"I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature."
"When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your'e the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying."
"We are wiser than we know."
"The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. "
"Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great."
"The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows..."
"For nonconformity the world will whip you with its displeasure."
"It is a happy talent to know how to play."
"Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world."
"This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."
"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."
"I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching."
"There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us."
"Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors."
"To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again."
"The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is."
"Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science."
"To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom."
"Give all to love."
Ralph Waldo Emerson