Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."

"Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect."

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

"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."

"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."

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

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

"No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it."

"Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great."

"You become what you think about all day long."

"A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature."

"A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking."

"The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret."

"Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you."

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."

"Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus."

"Always do what you are afraid to do."

"His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong"

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer."

"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next."