Language is fossil poetry

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows us that we are of enough importance to be courted.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteors of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his experience had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed and planted and talked and bought and sold; he had read books, he had eaten and drunken…yet there was not a surmise, a hint…that he had lived at all. The true preacher can be known by this, that he offers to the people his life - life passed through the fire of his thought.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harvard Divinity School, 1838.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson