Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who loses a day loses life.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be only to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.

A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like unto him wherever he goes. What you are comes to you.

Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life.

No sensible person ever made an apology.

Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom!

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you.

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

Sorrow makes us all children again.