Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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For the prevision is allied Unto the thing so signified; Or say, the foresight that awaits Is the same Genius that creates.
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It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
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Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
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If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
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My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.
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In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, - and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.
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One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly.
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Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
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For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
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There is always safety in valor.
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The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.
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Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.
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I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.
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In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.
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Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.
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In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.
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Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
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I wiped away the weeds and foam, And fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.
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Olympian bards who sung Divine Ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.
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It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
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Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.
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You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
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But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.
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Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.