Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

After a few months’ acquaintance with European coffee, one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn’t something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly – a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words.

Why do you hasten to remove anything which hurts your eye, while if something affects your soul you postpone the cure until next year?

Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.

This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put.

God is better served in resisting a Temptation to Evil, than in many formal Prayers.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.