To be great is to be misunderstood.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.

The law is only a memorandum.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

The key to every man is his thought . . . . He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

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

No facts to me are sacred; none are profane.

All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

All conservatives are such from personal defects.

Our age is retrospective. Why should we not also enjoy its original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition ... why should we grope among the bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also. There is more flax and wool in the fields. Let us demand our own works and law and worship.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.

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

The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.

When the eyes say one thing and the tongue another, the practiced person relies on the language of the first.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between two.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

These quotes are from Emerson's letters, works, and journals. I tried to steer clear from his Self-Reliance quotes because those are his most famous...