A dozen from Walt Whitman, born May 31, 1819

Keep your face always toward the sunshine--and shadows will fall behind you.

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

We were together. I forget the rest.

I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.

Happiness, not in another place, but this place... not for another hour, but for this hour.

I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch.

I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.

To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

I exist as I am, that is enough.

10 Inspiring Quotes

Here are 10 inspiring quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, born this day in 1803 (d. 1882):

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.

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

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.

A wise man born May 18

Quotes from Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell (1872-1970):
"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge."
"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."
"Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know."
"The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible."
"We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things we don't like."
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
"The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."
"I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite."