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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to hermother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every thought is public,
Every nook is wide;
Thy gossips spread each whisper,
And the gods from side to side.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Old age brings along with its uglinesses the comfort that you will soon be out of it, - which ought to be a substantial relief to such discontented pendulums as we are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The whole of what we know is a system of compensation. Every defect in one manner is made up in another. Every suffering is rewarded; every sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The sermon which I write inquisitive of truth is good a year after, but that which is written because a sermon must be writ is musty the next day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is a capital blunder; as you discover, when another man recites his charities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and daughters.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ever fresh the broad creation,
A divine improvisation,
From the heart of God proceeds,
A single will, a million deeds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There are geniuses in trade as well as in war, or the state, or letters; and the reason why this or that man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the man: that is all anybody can tell you about it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man is actually weak, and apparently strong. To himself, he seems weak; to others, formidable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and in large relations; whilst they must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of thehuman mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstacy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man's limitations, it is all over with him. Has he talents? has heenterprise? has he knowledge? It boots not. Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you never see it again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The persons who constitute the natural aristocracy, are not found in the actual aristocracy, or, only on its edge; as the chemicalenergy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature has her own best mode of doing each thing, and she has somewhere told it plainly, if we will keep our eyes and ears open. If not, she will not be slow in undeceiving us, when we prefer our own way to hers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused. In the progress ofthe character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a decreasing faith in propositions.
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
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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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nature
life
thought
love
power
time
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truth
mind
god
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day
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