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Ralph Waldo Emerson -
Nature (1836)
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I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easilyborn; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the description of it be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"What we know, is a point to what we do not know." Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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And thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. Person makes event and event person.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But in our experience, man is cheap and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeinga Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Creative Commons
Born:
May 25, 1803
Died:
April 27, 1882
(aged 78)
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