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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
Knowledge
History
Art
Elegance
Philosophy

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be madeby the reception of beautiful sentiments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If a man lose his balance, and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cultivated man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Things bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize or accept another's dogmatism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Language is the archives of history.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. Football is four 15-minute quarters. Plus timeouts and commercials.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion,not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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An expense of ends to means is fateMorganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We must learn the language of facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson