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If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But these young scholars who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Can we never extract the tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if he has a headache.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The South-wind brings Life, sunshine and desire, And on every mount and meadow Breathes aromatic fire; But over the dead he has no power, The lost, the lost, he cannot restore; And, looking over the hills, I mourn The darling who shall not return.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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 to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Quote of the day
Yet would we die as some have done: Beating a way for the rising sun.
Arna Bontemps
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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nature
life
thought
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Ralph Waldo Emerson on Wikipedia
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