Ralph Waldo Emerson

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

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.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

Best friends that pick wedgies together stay besties for life!

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.

Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Every artist was first an amateur.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

It is natural to die as to be born.