Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

Children are all foreigners.

Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

Nature hates calculators.

As to the rout that is made about people who are ruined by extravagance, it is no matter to the nation that some individuals suffer. When so much general productive exertion is the consequence of luxury, the nation does not care though there are debtors; nay, they would not care though their creditors were there too.

Fidelity has enfranchised slaves, and adopted servants to be sons.

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

A shoe that is too large is apt to trip one, and when too small, to pinch the feet. So it is with those whose fortune does not suit them.

What you can’t pay back you pay forward.

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten.