For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.
Interpretation
Every gain comes with a cost or sacrifice.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote suggests that for any positive advantage or benefit we gain in life, there is an inherent cost associated with itβoften metaphorically referred to as a 'tax.' This can imply that nothing valuable comes without effort or trade-offs, and it prompts us to consider the balance between gain and loss in our pursuits.
In practice
During a seminar about entrepreneurship, one might say this quote to highlight the investments needed for success.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.
Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton. Lie down in the bed of dust; Bear the fruit that bear you must; Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as night.
He that gives all, though but little, gives much; because God looks not to the quantity of the gift, but to the quality of the givers.
There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.
There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition. There are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.
Visions of glory, spare my aching sight! Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul!
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