Ralph Waldo Emerson

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

Nothing astonishes people so much as common sense and plain dealing.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.

The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

Youth gets together with their materials to build a bridge to the moon or maybe a palace on earth; then in middle age they decide to build a woodshed with them instead.

You cannot run faster than a bullet.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.

He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think – yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

Duties are not performed for duty’s sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty -the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

He that has given today may, if he so please, take away tomorrow.