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Knowledge is the only elegance.

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
Art
Elegance
Philosophy
Knowledge
History

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He only is rich who owns the day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step downward, is a step upward. The man who renounceshimself, comes to himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is and to remold it nearer the heart's desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great conversation ... requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Art is a jealous mistress.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy,--more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Popularity is for dolls.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In these divine pleasures permitted to me of walks in the June night under moon and stars, I can put my life as a fact before me and stand aloof from its honor and shame.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is a principle which is the basis of things, which all speech aims to say, and all action to evolve, a simple, quiet, undescribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in us, our rightful lord: we are not to do, but to let do not to work, but to be worked upon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson