Ralph Waldo Emerson

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

The less government we have the better.

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

Travel is a fools paradise.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

He will be loved when dead, who was envied when he was living.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large mattertis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.

I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Always play like an underdog.

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.