Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

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

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

Strange – is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.

The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

Never learn to do anything. If you don’t learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you.

Lilac anemone, paper petals, turning tentatively to face a pale sun opening to reveal a lightness of being, a flash of gold, a fresh resilience, contented silence, the dawn of a new day.

It’s like something shifted when I spoke to you, I can’t even put words to it. This sense of gentle peace, space, lightness, freedom. The realization that the longing I carried for so long, that pain was not about him all along. It was the yearning to return to that place from which, once upon a time, we all came.

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

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

The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money’s sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal.That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

Only in the darkness can you see the stars.