Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
To fill the hour that is happiness to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.
He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.
A day is a miniature eternity.
The surest poison is time.
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions.
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one's self?
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity but in being uninteresting.
Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
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.
Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.
Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not do.
No sensible person ever made an apology.
Every reform was once a private opinion and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.
Sanity is very rare every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.
Self-command is the main elegance.
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you.
Self-trust is the first secret of success.
It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much but I am my own comedy and tragedy.
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.
Discontent is want of self-discipline it is infirmity of will.
Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer.
All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
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.
Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.
Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.
Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining but they make them artificial.
To finish the moment to find the journey's end in every step of the road to live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom.
No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and ridiculous.
Every artist was first an amateur.
Strong men greet war tempest hard times. They wish as Pindar said to tread the floors of hell with necessities as hard as iron.
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.
We go to Europe to be Americanized.
What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
