Ralph Waldo Emerson

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

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

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

The eye is easily frightened.

The way to do well is to do well.

Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.

Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.

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.

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.

It is by the goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…

There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

The more experiments you make the better.

Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.