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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Though I am weak, yet God, when prayed, Cannot withhold his conquering aid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no bad heart in the observer, but, simply that the majority are unripe, andhave not yet come to themselves, do not yet know their opinion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter theunion, the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend towhat addresses the senses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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One of our statesmen said, "The curse of this country is eloquent men."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode.It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it up.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Each animal or vegetable form remembers the next inferior and predicts the next higher.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We learn that God IS; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows of him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The intellect,-that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false,--this is the mark and character of intelligence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Geology, a science of forty or fifty summers, has had the effect to throw an air of novelty and mushroom speed over entire history... Geology itself is only chemistry with the element of time added.
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It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For this present, hard
Is the fortune of the bard,
Born out of time;
All his accomplishment,
From Nature's utmost treasure spent,
Booteth not him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth. In America there is a touch of shame when a man exhibits theevidences of large property, as if after all it needed apology. But the Englishman has pure pride in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. A coarse logic rules throughout all English souls: if you have merit, can you not show it by your good clothes and coach and horses?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole aspect of things changes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design,--he will presently undervalue the actual object.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For we do not listen with the best regard to the verses of a man who is only a poet, nor to his problems if he is only an algebraist; but if a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundations of things and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic musical.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of talent, but to thegrand interests, superficial success is of no account.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Quote of the day
My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.
Richard Adams
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:
man
nature
life
thought
love
power
time
soul
truth
mind
god
find
day
beauty
eyes
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