Ralph Waldo Emerson

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

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

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.

We hate the kindness which we understand.

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.

America is another name for opportunity.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

I’m taking more time to listen to myself. It’s allowed me to be an aggressive bad ass, calling it as I see it

This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.

I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.