Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
For nature beats in perfect tune, And rounds with rhyme her every rune, Whether she work in land or sea, Or hide underground her alchemy. Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
Quotes to Explore
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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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Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
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Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
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We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
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Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
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What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
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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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Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
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Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands.
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Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
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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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The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.
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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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A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
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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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Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
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There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.
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The only way to have a friend is to be one.
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I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
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Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.
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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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What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
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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.