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Society is always taken by surprise
at any new example of common sense.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Related topics: Cute Whimsey Cynical Wisdom
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
Fear defeats more people than
any other one thing in the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Thank You,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Every wall is a door.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When It's Darkest, Men See the Stars.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What lies behind us and what lies before us
are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
- 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
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
As soon as there is life there is danger.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine,
a possession for all time.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants,
and to serve them one's self?
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To leave the world a bit better ...
to know that one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius is the power to labor better and more availably.
Deserve thy genius: exalt it.
- 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
The revelation of thought takes men
out of servitude into freedom.
- 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
This time, like all times, is a very good one,
if we but know what to do with it.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Enthusiasm is the mother of effort,
and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What you do speaks so loudly
that I cannot hear what you say.
- 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
Do the thing you fear,
and death of fear is certain.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a good ear, in some men,
that draws supplies to virtue
out of very indifferent nutriment.
- 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
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise man in the storm prays God,
not for safety from danger,
but for deliverance from fear.
It is the storm within which endangers him,
not the storm without.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
- 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
The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity,
but in being uninteresting.
- 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
Words are also actions,
and actions are a kind of words.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. -
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man can... make a better mousetrap,
the world will make a beaten path to his door.
- 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
Getting old is a fascination thing.
The older you get, the older you want to get.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
People seem not to see that
their opinion of the world
is also a confession of character.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The years teach much which the days never know.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is a masked ball,
where every one hides his real character,
and reveals it by hiding.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To know even one life has
breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The speed of the leader determines the rate of the pack.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is all gates, all opportunities,
strings of tension waiting to be struck.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
People do not seem to realize that
their opinion of the world
is also a confession of character.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A great man is always willing to be little.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Win as if you were used to it,
lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man has his own courage,
and is betrayed because he seeks in himself
the courage of other persons.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing external to you has any power over you.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Little minds have little worries,
big minds have no time for worries.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must be our own before we can be another's.
- 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
In the uttermost meaning of the words,
thought is devout, and devotion is thought.
Deep calls unto deep.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
People that seem so glorious are all show;
underneath they are like everyone else.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great men or men of great gifts
you shall easily find,
but symmetrical men never.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A chief event of life is the day in which
we have encountered a mind that startled us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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May the world be kind to you,
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- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
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