Ralph Waldo Emerson

Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

It is not the eye that sees the beauty of the heaven, but the soul.

Build therefore your own world.

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is—'Let there be truth between us two forevermore.'

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

Character is higher than intellect.

The years teach much which the days never know.

Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preëxists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.