Ralph Waldo Emerson

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

God is better served in resisting a Temptation to Evil, than in many formal Prayers.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.

The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption –pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism.

There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that’s just a fact.

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another s. We see so much only as we possess.

When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.