Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

The years teach much what the days never knew.

A man is related to all nature.

Half a man’s wisdom goes with his courage.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

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

Knowledge exists to be imparted.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

In charity there is no excess.

We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‘to do’ list.

It is of no consequence of what parents a man is born, as long as he be a man of merit.

It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, in justice, and in peace.

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