Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sorrow makes us children again.

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.

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.

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.

See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.

The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.

I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that you don’t know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.

Listening to both sides does not necessarily bring about a correct judgment.

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

The more you know the less you understand.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Dont be content with things as they are. Dont take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe… the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.