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In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.

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
Individual
Estate
History
Estates
Always
Account
Condition
Accounts
Conditions
Present
Party

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Let us leave hurry to slaves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But hospitality must be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The intellect,-that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Thy dangerous glances make women of men new-born, we are melting into nature again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Was never secret history but birds tell it in the bowers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but where the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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An action is the perfection and publication of thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Why needs a man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses, and places of amusement? Only for want of thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Talent may frolic and juggle genius realizes and adds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world is his who can see through its pretension.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson