Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.”

“Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.”

“Science does not know its debt to imagination.”

“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.”

“Genius always finds itself a century too early.”

“Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.”

“No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.”

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

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

“A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.”

“Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.”

“I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.”

“Men are what their mothers made them.”

“Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.”

“Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.”

“There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.”

“Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.”

“Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.”

“The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.”

“In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.”

“A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.”

“Money often costs too much.”

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

“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”