Quote

An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy. ... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye it transcends speech it is the bodily symbol of identity.

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
Like
Vision
Symbols
Glance
Seeing
Mood
Kicking
Levelled
Wonderful
Gun
Loaded
Hissing
Eye
Kindness
Glances
Beams
Nature
Identity
Altered
Transcends
Heart
Dance
Awe
Bodily
Make
Speech
Symbol
Threaten
Things
Joy
Insult
Beam

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
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The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect... it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labour of a wise and spiritual nation.
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It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.
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All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.
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The world is the ring of his spells, And the play of his miracles.
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In dreams we are true poets we create the persons of the drama we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours and we listen with surprise to what they say.
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Each age, it is found, must write its own books or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
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Economy does not consist in saving the coal, but in using the time while it burns.
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God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. Always, always, always, always, always do what you are afraid to do. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.
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Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it.
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Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love Him was happiness--to love Him in others' virtues.
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A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.
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A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.
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The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.
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Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.
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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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The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.
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Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson