Ralph Waldo Emerson

The god of victory is said to be one-handed, but peace gives victory on both sides.

Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Give, even if you only have little.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.