Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends."

"Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none."

"Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them."

"Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up"

"He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses."

"The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common."

"To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom."

"Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself."

"What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find."

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."

"In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine."

"No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it."

"Pictures must not be too picturesque."

"Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

"Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science."

"The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret."

"Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed."

"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn"

"Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art."