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Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.
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
Sake
Politics
Laborer
State
Laborers
States
Libertarianism
Men
Communism
Libertarian
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Exists
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The State is our neighbors our neighbors are the State.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines but meet on what common ground remains,--if onlythat the sun shines, and the rain rains for both the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.
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
Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?--or, prior to that, answer me this, Are you victimizable?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thefts never enrich alms never impoverish murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie-for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance-will instantly vitiate the effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forgo all things for that,and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have heard that death takes us away from ill things, not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man we pronounce the belief of immortality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret is the answer to all that has been, all that is, and all that will ever be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great conversation ... requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
