Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

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

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is – Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

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.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

Riches are for spending.

Ready are you? What know you of ready?

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Blame is safer than praise.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

There is only one thing about which I shall have no regrets when my life ends. I have savored to the full all the small, daily joys. The bright sunshine on the breakfast table; the smell of the air at dusk; the sound of the clock ticking; the light rains that start gently after midnight; the hour when the family come home; Sunday-evening tea before the fire! I have never missed one moment of beauty, not even taken it for granted. Spring, summer, autumn, or winter. I wish I had failed as little in other ways.

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

A verse from the Veda says, ‘What you see, you become.’ In other words, just the experience of perceiving the world makes you what you are. This is a quite literal statement.