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Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding

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
Leaping
Measured
Lightning
Enthusiasm
Horse
Understanding
Power

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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If the race is good, so is the place.
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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.
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The wings of Time are black and white, Pied with morning and with night.
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People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little.
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It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.
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Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Everything in our world, even a drop of dew, is a microcosm of the universe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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They think him the best dressed man, whose dress is so fit for his use that you cannot notice or remember to describe it.
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The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.
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Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
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We come to our own and would make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We can never part with it the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what health, what affinity!
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When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.
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None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.
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Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron show,--the rootsof all things are in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Such is the active power of good temperament! Great sweetness of temper neutralizes such vast amounts of acid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every body we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow?
Ralph Waldo Emerson