Ralph Waldo Emerson

Language is the archives of history.

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I was the same old me. Just like the Moon yesterday. But because of all the other factors that came to play, the darkness, the brightness, the blood red color. They all were a reflection, a projection due to the perfect set of circumstances. The Moon was still the Moon. But it was still labeled the Super Blue Blood Moon, Just so we can have some understanding, but, again I’ll state, the Moon was still just the Moon, just like I was still just me. Whatever you project on me, and I reflect back, doesn’t then make me become a new person, it’s just a reflection of your projection. I am still just me.

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

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

Nothing does more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.

If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.