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I didn't find my friends the good Lord gave them to me.

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
Good
Friendship
Gave
Lord
Friends
Didn
Find

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be.
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He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.
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Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.
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What torments of grief you endured, from evils that never arrived
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Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.
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The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let us advance on Chaos and the Dark
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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.
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The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.
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The powers of the Soul are commensurate with its needs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,--familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination knows practically Marshal Saxe's rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.
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Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul unbelief in denying them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson