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The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Age: 78 †
Born: 1803
Born: May 25
Died: 1882
Died: April 27
Biographer
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Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion,not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends: and in nature is no end but every thing, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeinga Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our opinions of the world, are confessions of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The health of the eye demands a horizon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books take their place according to their specific gravity as surely as potatoes in a tub.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, All summer in the field, and all winter in the study. And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day and cost us nothing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why needs a man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses, and places of amusement? Only for want of thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
