Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sanity is very rare: every man almost, and every woman, has a dash of madness.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Each man has his own vocation his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Our distrust is very expensive.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Sorrow makes us all children again - destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
He who travels in search of something which he has not got, travels away from himself and grows old even in youth among old things.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls and to tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-values all the utilities of the world.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The things taught in colleges and schools are not an education, but the means of education.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - "Let there be truth between us two forevermore."
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Every burned book enlightens the world.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The years teach much which the days never knew.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Do what we can, summer will have its flies.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
God enters by a private door into each individual.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
A man finds room in the few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Success: To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may will call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please - you can never have both.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
There is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Nature hates calculators.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
We are always getting ready to live but never living.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the shoe leather has passed into the fiber of your body. I measure your health by the number of shoes and hats and clothes you have worn out.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The education of the will is the object of our existence.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
It is only when the mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do... Build, therefore, your own world.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
A man's library is a sort of harem.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
A lady, with whom I was riding in the forest, said to me, that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has passed onward: a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The unique impression of Jesus upon mankind - whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of the world - is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion. Jesus belonged to the race of prophets. He saw with open eyes the mystery of the soul. One man was true to what is in you and me. He, as I think, is the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of man.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
A child is a curly dimpled lunatic.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Life is short but there is always time for courtesy.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes