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Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

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
Physical
Shreds
Mankind
Misfits
Start
Patches
Wells
Borrowed
Well
Metaphysical
Thing
Ancestors
Good
Ancestor
Unequally
Men
Humankind
Misfit

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.
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Nature is saturated with Deity.
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He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.
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Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.
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I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In daily life what distinguishes the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well.
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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.
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Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.
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Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself.
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I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?--or, prior to that, answer me this, Are you victimizable?
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And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.
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Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
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Not a ray is dimmed, not an atom worn nature's oldest force is as good as new.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.
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The dearest events are summer-rain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When a man becomes cultivated, he develops a new respect for who he is. This causes him to be ashamed of his past identification of himself and others according to things, i.e. property.
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Pride is handsome, economical pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride.
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As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we now possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds.
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