Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.

The quickest way to become troubled is to be concerned with what people are gonna say about your life and your work.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don’t labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Best friends that pick wedgies together stay besties for life!

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

The more experiments you make the better.