Ralph Waldo Emerson

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

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

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

We have not so good a right to hate any as our Friend.

A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.

The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.

Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.

With a burst of joy, my heels sprout wings, smile dancing. My heart sings like a bird caged, set free to soar, senses heightened like never before. Life. Is. Good.

You’ll never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption –pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.