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I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

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
Dip
Ink
Gambling
Pens
Falling
Afraid
Risk
Blackest
Fall
Scepticism

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We stand against fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to a man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds it new and bigger.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The greatest homage to truth is to use it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is no calamity that right words will not begin to redress
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Instead of making Christianity a vehicle of truth, you make truth only a horse for Christianity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is a series of surprises.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Some eyes threaten like a loaded and levelled pistol, and others are as insulting as hissing or kicking some have no more expression than blueberries, while others are as deep as a well which you can fall into.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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How much of human life is lost in waiting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am old, yet I look at wise men and see that I am very young. I look over those stars yonder, and into the myriads of the aspirant and ordered souls, and see I am a stranger and a youth and have yet my spurs to win. Too ridiculous are these airs of age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Fashion understands itself good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I think all men know better than they do know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles but they darenot trust their presentiments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.
Ralph Waldo Emerson