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America means opportunity, freedom, power.

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
Opportunity
Means
Power
America
Mean
Military
Freedom

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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True friends are two people who are comfortable sharing silence together.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In spite of warnings, change rarely occurs until the status quo becomes more painful than change. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is and to remold it nearer the heart's desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In these divine pleasures permitted to me of walks in the June night under moon and stars, I can put my life as a fact before me and stand aloof from its honor and shame.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but willpick and cavil, and tell the odious truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Tis the good reader that makes the good book in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The peace of the man who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace, but a canting impotence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I quote another man's saying unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function living is the functionary.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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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The finest poetry was first experience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.
Ralph Waldo Emerson