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People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Age: 78 †
Born: 1803
Born: May 25
Died: 1882
Died: April 27
Biographer
Diarist
Essayist
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Content
Intellectual
Knowing
Life
People
Disparage
Urge
Urges
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us leave hurry to slaves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must be courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top but through sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert fires people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The beautiful is never plentiful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not larger than a calf-skin: shuts the eyes so that we cannot see the horse that is running away with us worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lawyers are a prudent race though not very fond of liberty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To eat bread is one thing to love the precepts of Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chiefly the sea-shore has been the point of departure to knowledge, as to commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is with a good book as it is with good company.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every advantage has its tax.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
