Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Every genius is a variation of human nature."

"Courage is not the absence of fear but the assessment that something else is more important."

"The mind cannot be narrower than nature can make it."

"Time is the coin of your life; it is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent."

"What we have loved becomes a part of us."

"The mind's ultimate worth and reward is to transcend individual existence."

"To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—this is to have succeeded."

"The greatest wealth is health."

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

"There is always a right word to express what we feel."

"Life is a journey, not a destination."

"The universe is composed of Nature and the Soul."

"Every evil is its own cure."

"The years teach much which the days never knew."

"In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself."

"Goodness is the only investment that never fails."

"The greatest delight is in the exchange of ideas."

"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow; the shadow is what we think of it, the tree is the real thing."

"All things are moral, and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature."

"The eyes are easily deceived; the heart never."

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

"The surest way to corrupt youth is to instruct them to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently."

"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns."

"Men who know themselves are no longer fools; they stand on the threshold of the real world."

"The mass of mankind concerns itself not with the abstract but with the concrete."

"Society is a reality only in the feeling that men have in common."

"Every man is wanted, and nobody could be spared."

"The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust."

"Life is about the same for all of us and contains the same infinite suggestion."

"To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a man set about doing it."