Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time.”

“Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them.”

“And we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance.”

“That imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion.”

“Though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

“Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.”

“Every act rewards itself.”

“There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own nature.”

“The soul is.”

“Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being.”

“Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause.”

“Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.”

“What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears.”

“The world looks like a multiplication table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.”

“All things are double, one against another. — Tit for tat; an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.”

“Give and it shall be given you.”

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”