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Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.
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
Reveals
Hiding
Ball
Balls
Society
Masked
Character
Pathos
Real
Hides
Every
Theft
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chiefly the sea-shore has been the point of departure to knowledge, as to commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty rests on necessities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every young man is prone to be misled by the suggestions of his own ill-founded ambition which he mistakes for the promptings of asecret genius, and thence dreams of unrivaled greatness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, of the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever limits us we call fate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The charm of fine manners is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of these arts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful and lovely, is degrading and futile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist meeting-house.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.
Ralph Waldo Emerson