Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it.

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

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.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

You cannot do a kindness too soon.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.

But harder still it has proved to resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel, and Bobinson, and their parliaments, and their whole generation, adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief that they were enriching the country which they were impoverishing.

In the great books of India, an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence, which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the questions that exercise us.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

What we have learned from other becomes our own reflection.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

The reason why all men honor love is because it looks up, and not down; aspires and not despairs.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

All promise outruns performance.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.

Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold it's great proportions.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.