Quote

Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

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
Take
Shall
Masterly
Good
Opinion
Latent
Time
Speak
Precisely
Sense
Forced
Felt
Stranger
Else
Conviction
Another
Shame
Thought
Tomorrow

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.
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The unbelief of the age is attested by the loud condemnation of trifles.
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And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.
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No institution will be better than the institutor.
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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.
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Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
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[on Thoreau:] For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to truth itself.
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We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!
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We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, forthat is a way of receiving it from ourselves but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living it.
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Solitude is naught and society is naught. Alternate them and the good of each is seen.
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The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.
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I do not wish to please him I wish that he should wish to please me.
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Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.
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No facts to me are sacred none are profane.
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Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character.
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The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.
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Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.
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Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
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A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment and even obstacles and opposition will but make us like the fabled specter-ships, which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind.
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How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.
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