Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

Reality is a sliding door.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid.

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity’s mind and were willing to reveal it.

Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content.

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

All mankind love a lover.

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.