Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Do what we can, summer will have its flies.

Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.

Equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying the whole way to hell.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Our thinking and our behaviour are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based.

Friends are true Twins in Soul; they Sympathize in every thing, and have the Love and Aversion. One is not happy without the other, nor can either of them be miserable alone. As if they could change Bodies, they take their turns in Pain as well as in Pleasure; relieving one another in their most adverse Conditions.What one enjoys, the other cannot Want. Like the Primitive Christians, they have all things in common, and no Property but in one another.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sun beams and you will always look lovely!

In all debates let truth be thy aim; not victory or an unjust interest; and endeavor to gain rather than to expose thy antagonist.

That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.