Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

My favorite nightcap, after all this time, is still the cocktail of you.

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.

When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.

What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

Bondage is… subjection to external influences and internal negative thoughts and attitudes.

Opening amenities are often opening inanities.