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Ralph Waldo Emerson -
Life
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Man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self-protection that mothers say the salvation of the life and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be
And life pulsates in rock or tree.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world is an immense picture-book of every passage in human life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample borrowers of eternity they are!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole aspect of things changes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer, or suffer. I renounce the whole tribe of fero. I embrace absolute life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.
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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Would we codify the laws that should reign in households, and whose daily transgression annoys and mortifies us, and degrades our household life, we must adorn every day with sacrifices. Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched.
Through thee the rose is red;
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let the realist not mind appearances. Let him delegate to others the costly courtesies and decorations of social life. The virtuesare economists, but some of the vices are also. Thus, next to humility, I have noticed that pride is a pretty good husband. A good pride is, as I reckon it, worth from five hundred to fifteen hundred a year.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and, in the dark, brings them friends from far.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, who would accept the gift of life?
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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When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name; the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience.
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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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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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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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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In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Creative Commons
Born:
May 25, 1803
Died:
April 27, 1882
(aged 78)
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