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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The cannon will not suffer any other sound to be heard for miles and for years around it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship; never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defenders, whether Luther, or William Penn, or St. Paul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We do what we can, and then make a theory to prove our performance the best.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him [H.D. Thoreau]. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Show us an arc of the curve, and a good mathematician will find out the whole figure. We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the viceof religion, is one with that of the private life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we callFate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The root of the plant is not unsightly to science...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As much wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea.
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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life
thought
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