Ralph Waldo Emerson

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

What you are comes to you.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

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; begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

The greatest good in a democracy is that every man is a king.

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

The health of the eye demands a horizon.

Beauty without expression is a bore.

We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.