Ralph Waldo Emerson

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

Shallow people believe in luck and in circumstances; Strong people believe in cause and effect.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

There is a great deal of human nature in people.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

Every time I think I have reached the peak, I look up and see I still have a ways to go. But I look back and see just how far I have come.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

If you are good, life is good.

How does it happen, Maecenas, that no one is content with that lot of which he has chosen or which chance has thrown his way, but praises those who follow a different course?

In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.