Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

The receipts of cookery are swelled to a volume; but a good stomach excels them all.

Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please – even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

Dare to think for yourself.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

We had the sky up there, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss whether they was made or just happened.

When speculation has done its worst, two and two still make four.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.