Ralph Waldo Emerson

Language is the archives of history.

A weed is a plant whose virtue is not yet known.

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in the river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

Venus, when her son was lost,_x000D_ _x000D_ Cried him up and down the coast,_x000D_ _x000D_ In hamlets, palaces, and parks,_x000D_ _x000D_ And told the truant by his marks,-_x000D_ _x000D_ Golden curls, and quiver, and bow.

Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins

The basis of good manners is self-reliance.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the show fiber has passed into your body.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

For each thorn, there's a rosebud... For each twilight - a dawn... For each trial - the strength to carry on, For each storm cloud - a rainbow... For each shadow - the sun... For each parting - sweet memories when sorrow is done.

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee, from the hill-top looking down; And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton tolling the bell at noon, Dreams not that great Napoleon Sto