Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

This gives force to the strong — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and bark.

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

If you live for people’s acceptance, you’ll die from their rejections.

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

The sky was the color of hard crimson, dripping down a canvas, the moon splashed silver across red. Her soothing balm healing my soul in swathes of calmness, I breathe in her tides and let my body be washed ashore, lying in the sands of eternity.

The never-ending task of self improvement.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

The years teach much what the days never knew.

The more you know, the less you need.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

God is better served in resisting a Temptation to Evil, than in many formal Prayers.

Studies serve for delight, for ornaments, and for ability.