Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Earth fills her lap with splendors not her own.”

“If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.”

“Bad counsel confounds the adviser.”

“The Furies, they say, are attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven should transgress his path they would punish him.”

“In Nature nothing can be given, all things are sold.”

“Power is in nature the essential measure of right.”

“Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess.”

“Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.”

“Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse.”

“It is impossible to tilt the beam.”

“All the cheats are at last detected.”

“Crime and punishment grow out of one stem.”

“Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it.”

“The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment.”

“There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense.”

“To live a life half-dead, a living death.”

“All things must be tried — only one experience is final.”

“Patience and patience, we shall win at the last.”

“Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.”