If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

‎"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 gem in a useful life." Ralph Waldo Emerson

I do then with my friends as I do with my books, I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. 
This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, 
may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. 
It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what 
is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only way to have a friend is to be one.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trust to that prompting within you; no man ever got above it.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be great is to be a nonconformist.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only gift is a portion of thyself.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is hard to be simple enough to be good.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not be too timid and squemish about your actions.  All life is an experiment.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson