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We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

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
Motivational
Duty
Names
Call
Past
Best
Must

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!
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We are not free to use today, or to promise tomorrow, because we are already mortgaged to yesterday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The democrat is a young conservative the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The passive master lent his hand, To the vast Soul which o'er him planned.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The inmost in due time becomes the outmost.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is a principle which is the basis of things, which all speech aims to say, and all action to evolve, a simple, quiet, undescribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in us, our rightful lord: we are not to do, but to let do not to work, but to be worked upon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other estates in the realm and where fame and secular promotion are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the unanimous respect of all cultivated nations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Beside all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer's profession, when a man enters it considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's home, could suggest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though it may be, I have not the smallest interest in any holiday, except as it celebrates real and not pretended joys.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.
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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All science is transcendental or else passes away.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Genius has no taste for weaving sand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson