Ralph Waldo Emerson Debt Quotations

We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlars.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes; what a satire this is on government.

The whole of what we know is a system of compensation. Every defect in one manner is made up in another. Every suffering is rewarded; every sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

Wouldst thou shut up the avenues of ill, Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?

It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.

Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is with-held, the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.

You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity.

We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young anddodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.

Every novel is a debtor to Homer.

The borrower runs in his own debt.

Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt.

When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim.