Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.

Excite the soul, and the weather and the town and your condition in the world all disappear; the world itself loses its solidity, nothing remains but the soul and the Divine Presence in which it lives.

Every sweet hath its sour, every evil its good.

The present is an edifice which God cannot rebuild.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

O Lord! Unhappy is the man whom man can make unhappy.

The only reward of virtue is virtue.

When there is no vision, people perish.

Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth.

A wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interests than it is theirs to find his weak point.

What torments of grief you endured, from evils that never arrived.

And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship.