Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature… She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

The place of justice is a hallowed place.

Logic is like the sword

Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can be what you want to be.

A crank is someone with a new idea – until it catches on.

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

I thus free myself from the illness of ego-clinging.

He that has given today may, if he so please, take away tomorrow.

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

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.