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As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.

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
Science
Cotton
Nature
Inventor
Find
Gods
Every
Plant
Mind
Property
Time
Seek
Demi
Bring
Prolific
Born
Whitney

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
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In imitation is a bit suicide.
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The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
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To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity.
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Justice satisfies everybody, and justice alone.
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Teach the children! It is painting in fresco.
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The Oversoul is before Time, and Time, Father of all else, is one of his children.
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The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity.
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Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being.
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The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by redemption of the soul.
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Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.
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A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
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The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible archetype.
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Knowledge is the antidote to fear. [especially as fear often stands for false evidence appearing real!]
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Do not be caught by the sensational in nature, as a coarse red-faced sunset, a garrulous waterfall, or a fifteen thousand foot mountain... avoid prettiness - the word looks much like pettiness - and there is but little difference between them.
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To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.
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A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.
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In the country, without any interference from the law, the agricultural life favors the permanence of families.
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Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which, Nature never pardons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson