Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

This gives force to the strong — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

Genius Borrows nobly.

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

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

The first wealth is health.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.

Mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.

In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

That after an hour’s silence he can say, The one thing I cannot stand is dampness… That’s all, it took him an hour to work that out.

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.