I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are what their mothers made them.
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
We acquire the strength we have overcome.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
God screens us evermore from premature ideas.
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
Children are all foreigners.
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
Money often costs too much.
The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
America is another name for opportunity.
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Nature hates calculators.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
Genius always finds itself a century too early.
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
A man in debt is so far a slave.
As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
Reality is a sliding door.
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
