Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

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

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

Surely life, if it be not long, is tedious, since we are forced to call in the assistance of so many trifles to rid us of our time, of that time which never can return.

According to this law [the law of Dharma], you have a unique talent and a unique way of expressing it. There is something that you can do better than anyone else in the whole world–and for every unique talent and unique expression of that talent, there are also unique needs. When these needs are matched with the creative expression of your talent, that is the spark that creates affluence. Expressing your talents to fulfill needs creates unlimited wealth and abundance.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

Seek not to be Rich, but Happy. The one lies in Bags, the other in Content: which Wealth can never give.

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.