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

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Let him be great, and love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the insane levity of choosing associates by others eyes.
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All ages of belief have been great all of unbelief have been mean.
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Some eyes threaten like a loaded and levelled pistol, and others are as insulting as hissing or kicking some have no more expression than blueberries, while others are as deep as a well which you can fall into.
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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.
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There is always safety in valor.
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Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The eye is easily frightened.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.
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It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The uses of travel are occasional, and short but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation and this is a main function of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men.
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We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For flowers that bloom about our feet For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet For song of bird, and hum of bee For all things fair we hear or see, Father in heaven, we thank Thee!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The clergyman who lives in the city may have piety, but he must have taste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson