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The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.

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
Men
Seek
Friendship
Personality
Friend
Wise
True
Fragments
Character
Everywhere
Find
Finished

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Everything that is popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of philosophers: and this is for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any worth in itself, yet it characterizes the people.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The primary wisdom is intuition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous- looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap, dear house.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life,--do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or your child.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am old, yet I look at wise men and see that I am very young. I look over those stars yonder, and into the myriads of the aspirant and ordered souls, and see I am a stranger and a youth and have yet my spurs to win. Too ridiculous are these airs of age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Daughter of heaven and earth, coy Spring, With sudden passion languishing, Teaching barren moors to smile, Painting pictures mile on mile, Holds a cup of cowslip wreaths Whence a smokeless incense breathes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If the gatherer gathers too-much, Nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates, monopolies and exceptions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world is nothing, the man is all in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What a new face courage puts on everything!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,--and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial they are notequal to the work they pretend. They lose their way in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Frankness invites frankness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson