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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The day will come when no badge or uniform or star will be worn.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nor mourn the unalterable Days
That Genius goes and Folly stays.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One's enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The vanishing volatile froth of the present, which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine record of the past.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I wiped away the weeds and foam,
And fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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So is music an asylum. It takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence and whereto.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in the river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying out of gardens.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
thought
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