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The great will not condescend to take anything seriously.
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
Condescend
Seriously
Hero
Anything
Take
Great
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Never read any book that is not a year old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age,—lasting as space and time,—embosomed in time and space.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life seems not present, so much as prospective not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast- flowingvigor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Education should be as broad as man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Read proudly--put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it? I am quite ready to be charmed, but I shall not make-believe I am charmed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If it costs ten years, and ten to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A weed is a plant whose virtue is not yet known.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.
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
