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Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
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
Universal
Personality
Gives
Silence
Leave
Giving
Great
Solvent
Destroys
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do that which you fear to do, and the fear will die.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Accept your genius and say what you think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never opened there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Intellect is a fire rash and pitiless it melts this wonderful bone-house which is called man. Genius even, as it is the greatestgood, is the greatest harm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.
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
A man is a god in ruins.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The pest of society is egotists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effiminated by position of nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
