Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
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Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
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Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?
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It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
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The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.
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In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.
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Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
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Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
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Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
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None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.
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Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
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Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
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But these young scholars who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And travelling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.
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So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.
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Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
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The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
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Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.
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To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
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They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
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Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches.
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Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.
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His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.
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The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.