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What lies behind us and what lies before us
are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Related topics: Positive Inspirational Motivational Live-By Self Values
People only see what they are prepared to see.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson 
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.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When It's Darkest, Men See the Stars.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Thank You,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Every wall is a door.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children,
to leave the world a better place,
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived,
this is to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fear defeats more people than
any other one thing in the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do the thing you fear,
and death of fear is certain.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are as many pillows of illusion
as flakes in a snow-storm.
We wake from one dream into another dream.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To know even one life has
breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Unless you try to do something
beyond what you have already mastered,
you will never grow.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reason why men do not obey us,
is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Always do what you are afraid to do.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the illusions of life is that the present hour
is not the critical, decisive hour.
Write it on your heart that
every day is the best day in the year.
No man has learned anything rightly,
until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants,
and to serve them one's self?
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most of the shadows of life are caused
by standing in our own sunshine.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be great is to be misunderstood.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions;
it is easy in solitude to live after your own;
but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd
keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine,
a possession for all time.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Judge your natural character
by what you do in your dreams.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
As long as a man stands in his own way,
everything seems to be in his way.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Little minds have little worries,
big minds have no time for worries.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
You cannot do a kindness too soon,
for you never know how soon it will be too late.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A chief event of life is the day in which
we have encountered a mind that startled us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is the property of no individual
but is the treasure of all men.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Before we acquire great power
we must acquire wisdom to use it well.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sum of wisdom is that
time is never lost that is devoted to work.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Music takes us out of the actual
and whispers to us dim secrets
that startle our wonder as to who we are.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The invariable mark of wisdom is to
see the miraculous in the common.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person,
"Always do what you are afraid to do."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
As soon as there is life there is danger.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children
that makes the heart too big for the body.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What you do speaks so loudly
that I cannot hear what you say.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The years teach much which the days never know.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are by nature observers, and thereby learners.
That is our permanent state.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Write it on your heart that every day
is the best day in the year.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Peace cannot be achieved through violence,
it can only be attained through understanding.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man of genius inspires us with
a boundless confidence in our own powers.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
People that seem so glorious are all show;
underneath they are like everyone else.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who is not everyday conquering some fear
has not learned the secret of life.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
For everything you have missed,
you have gained something else,
and for everything you gain,
you lose something else.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be yourself in a world that
is constantly trying to make you something else
is the greatest accomplishment.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great men or men of great gifts
you shall easily find,
but symmetrical men never.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give a boy address and accomplishments
and you give him the mastery
of palaces and fortunes where he goes.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The speed of the leader determines the rate of the pack.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There comes 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 or for worse as his portion.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the stars should appear
but one night every thousand years
how man would marvel and stare.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
This time, like all times, is a very good one,
if we but know what to do with it.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are other measures of self-respect for a man,
than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hitch your wagon to a star.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a good ear, in some men,
that draws supplies to virtue
out of very indifferent nutriment.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us or we find it not.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
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