"Genial manners are good, and power of..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.”
“The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.”
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
More on Life Purpose
“The one piece of advice I can give you is, do what turns you on. Do something that if you had all the money in the world, you’d still be doing it. You’ve got to have a reason to jump out of bed in the morning.”
“If you seek what is honorable, what is good, what is the truth of your life, all the other things you could not imagine come as a matter of course.”
“Don't settle for anything other than your passion - if you're lucky enough to find it.”
More on Vocation
“A vocation makes us unthinking; that is its greatest blessing. For it is a bulwark behind which we are permitted to withdraw whencommonplace doubts and cares assail us.”
“A vocation is the backbone of life.”
“The most successful people are those who do all year long what they would otherwise do on their summer vacation.”