Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?

Wherever there is power there is age.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.

Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.

There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

People ignore the thing they have the most power over. I know so many people who will go to a protest and do something big on an issue. But they won’t deal with that issue in their home.

When you’re drowning, you don’t say ‘I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,’ you just scream.

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

She is but half a wife that is not, nor is capable of being, a friend.

Dharma is what the Buddha taught. It is the way of understanding and love-how to understand, how to love, how to make understanding and love into real things.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.