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Desire is possibility seeking expression.

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
Seeking
Possibility
Expression
Desire

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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My joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The sermon which I write inquisitive of truth is good a year after, but that which is written because a sermon must be writ is musty the next day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, forthat is a way of receiving it from ourselves but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If you take in a lie, you must take in all that belongs to it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am become a transparent eyeball.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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a good reader makes a good book
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every great man is unique.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends: and in nature is no end but every thing, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Examples are cited by soldiers, of men who have seen the cannon pointed, and the fire given to it, and who have stepped aside from he path of the ball. The terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlour and the cabin.
Ralph Waldo Emerson