Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints.

The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.

The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.

The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

To laugh often and much ... this is to have succeeded. Probably not from Emerson: here's the full quotation and the story.