Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

It is the nature of babies to be in bliss.

Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.