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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard no good as solid but that which is in his nature, and which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him scatter them on every wind as the momentary signs of his infinite productiveness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Yankee is one who, if he once gets his teeth set on a thing, all creation can't make him let go.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely thatwhich all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The time is coming when all men will see that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, buta sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Fashion which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-code.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology..
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing, but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town whichwas appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To wade in marshes and sea margins is the destiny of certain bird, and they are so accurately made for this that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly; the peas make no mistake, but come up and show his line.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The test of civilization is the power of drawing the most benefit out of cities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was a disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Good churches are not built by bad men; at least, there must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in the society. These minsters were neither built nor filled by atheists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The rain has spoiled the farmer's day;
Shall sorrow put my books away?
Thereby are two days lost.
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
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god
find
day
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Ralph Waldo Emerson on Wikipedia
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