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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
Diarist
Essayist
Philosopher
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Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Love
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Compassionate
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don't bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies and iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, and writing and come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than we when [he] threatens his whole threat I will not love you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How much of human life is lost in waiting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
They think him the best dressed man, whose dress is so fit for his use that you cannot notice or remember to describe it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man for whom the law exists - the man of forms, the conservative - is a tame man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Skepticism? Yes, but a saint is a skeptic once in twenty-four hours.
Ralph Waldo Emerson