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Ralph Waldo Emerson -
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If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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England's genius filled all measure
Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
Gave to the mind its emperor,
And life was larger than before:
Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, reallyshow very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The crime which bankrupts men and states is job-work-declining from your main design, to serve a turn here and there. Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life, nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line and say that society can never prosper but must always be bankrupts, until every man does that which he was created to do.
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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Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So muchfate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wise cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower of civilization, and the best result which life has to offer us,--a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play, and as the reproduction in finer form, of all our havings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisonedin mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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God will have life to be real; we will be damned, but it shall be theatrical.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Creative Commons
Born:
May 25, 1803
Died:
April 27, 1882
(aged 78)
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