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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Cities of mortals woe-begone Fantastic care derides, But in the serious landscape lone Stern benefit abides.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For he that feeds men serveth few;
He serves all who dares be true.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Thanks to the morning light, Thanks to the foaming sea, To the uplands of New Hampshire, To the green-haired forest free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In excited conversation we have glimpses of the universe, hints of power native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life,never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Religion must always be a crab fruit; it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion,not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ah Fate, cannot a man Be wise without a beard? East, West, from Beer to Dan, Say, was it never heard That wisdom might in youth be gotten, Or wit be ripe before 't was rotten?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Quote of the day
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Georges Bataille
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:
man
nature
life
thought
love
power
time
soul
truth
mind
god
find
day
beauty
eyes
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Wikipedia
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