Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Let him that would move the world, first move himself.

There is a great deal of human nature in people.

Which is worse? The wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

Surviving is important. Thriving is elegant.

We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.