Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: 'Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life'.
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Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.
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Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
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Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
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O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire.
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Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.
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The only way to have a friend is to be one.
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The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.
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Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
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Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
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What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
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Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
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Hitch your wagon to a star.
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Men are what their mothers made them.
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For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
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A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.
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There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
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Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
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Life is our dictionary.
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In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt it, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.
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Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.
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Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
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A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
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God screens us evermore from premature ideas.