Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

All diseases run into one, old age.

Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Spiritual force is stronger than material force; thoughts rule the world.

Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.

A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.

Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.

Thou art to me a delicious torment.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

The only true gift is a portion of yourself.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

All mankind loves a lover.

A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.

The reason why all men honor love is because it looks up, and not down; aspires and not despairs.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Give all to love; obey thy heart.

Hence arose the saying, If I love you, what is that to you? We say so, because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself, and can never know.

Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply, - 'Tis man's perdition to be safe When for the truth he ought to die

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.