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We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.
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
Thought
Idle
Today
Improvement
Much
Accomplished
Discovered
Busy
Whether
Indolent
Times
Afterwards
Inspirational
Begun
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. Person makes event and event person.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Solitary converse with nature for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Astrology is astronomy brought down to Earth and applied toward the affairs of men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize or accept another's dogmatism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life depends upon one's actions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tis the good reader that makes the good book a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
