Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

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.

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves…

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

No two men can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

What a new face courage puts on everything!

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe… the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.