Ralph Waldo Emerson

The surest poison is time.

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is – Let there be truth between us two forevermore.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

How much of human life is lost in waiting.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.

Stay with me,’ he said, ‘until the sun goes out, the seas are parched, and the wind draws its last breath.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

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

Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence – neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish – it is an imponderably valuable gift.

You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?

The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.