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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man will appear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the muse;
Nothing refuse.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Whoever fights, whoever falls,
Justice conquers evermore.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness, - an open and noble temper.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For it is not meters, but a metermaking argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Quote of the day
What's a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.
Robert Altman
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Creative Commons
Born:
May 25, 1803
Died:
April 27, 1882
(aged 78)
Bio:
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.
Known for:
Self-Reliance (1841)
Nature (1836)
Essays: First Series (1841)
Representative Men
The Conduct of Life (1860)
Most used words:
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life
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