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Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself.

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
Thyself
Apology
Portions
Gifts
Rings
Gift
Apologies
Portion
Jewels

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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What is man born for but to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made? A renouncer of lies a restorer of truth and good? Imitating that great Nature which embossoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, with every breath a new life?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Solitary converse with nature for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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You cannot make a cheap palace.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But there is no end to the praise of books, to the value of the library. Who shall estimate their influence on our population where all the millions read and write ? It is the joy of nations that man can communicate all his thoughts, discoveries and virtues to records that may last for centuries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A friend is a person who goes around saying nice things about you behind your back.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The vulgar call good fortune that which really is produced by the calculations of genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man I meet is in some way my superior...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man is the dwarf of himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.
Ralph Waldo Emerson