For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was an American essayist and lecturer, and the central figure of Transcendentalism. He left the ministry to write and speak publicly, and his essays Nature and Self-Reliance laid the groundwork for American thinking about the individual and their relation to society.
About this theme: Time
Time is the one theme here where every author writes from the same position — none of them had more of it than they had. Seneca devoted an essay to it, and his central claim is uncomfortable: we are not given a short life, we spend it in a way that makes it seem short.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
More on Time
- Lost time is never found again.— Benjamin Franklin
- The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.— Chinese Proverb
- It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.— Seneca
- The life given us by nature is short, but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.— Cicero
- The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.— Nikola Tesla