Ralph Waldo Emerson

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is – Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear.

Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

Nature hates calculators.

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.

Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

Earth laughs in flowers.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

It’s hard to have it all. And if you’re compromising through one phase of your journey, you’re not giving it all up, you’re compromising for that phase