Ralph Waldo Emerson

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.

A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

A man is related to all nature.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — `Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — 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.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is to prepare for the long haul, the rise and fall, and let neither define your sense of self.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

Tread softly, Breathe peacefully, Laugh hysterically.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.

In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of Heaven and Hell.

Whatever limits us we call fate.