Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art.
Ralph Waldo EmersonHe who has acquired the ability, may wait securely the occasion of making it felt and appreciated, and know that it will not loiter.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRemarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.
Ralph Waldo EmersonWhatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
Ralph Waldo EmersonWe sometimes observe that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem tomeasure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented if you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson