Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.”

“The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.”

“The first wealth is health.”

“There is properly no history, only biography.”

“A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds cloud...”

“If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it, at any rate, brag.”

“The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.”

“Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.”

“You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.”

“Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.”

“If you shoot at a king you must kill him.”

“In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.”

“Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.”

“The whole of what we know is a system of compensations. Each suffering is rewarded; each sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.”

“Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep.”

“I can find my biography in every fable that I read.”

“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at...”

“All mankind love a lover.”

“Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in.”

“Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.”