Quote

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.

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
People
Words
Step
Boulder
Place
Conversation
Boulders
Every
Along
Picking
Something
Steps
Observe
Way
Feet
Settings
Never
Game
Foot
Men
Shall
Setting
Time
Games
Using

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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One single idea may have greater weight than all the men, animals, and machines for a century.
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Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun.
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The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation when memory came, it was experience when mind acted, it was knowledge when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.
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Though we travel the world over to find beauty, we must carry it with us or we find it not . . . The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in beholders.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.
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We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said that words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Divine persons are character born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory organized.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every bystander to take his part.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The population of the world is a conditional population these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live there shall be a better, please God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven depending on whether they compare it to something better and so feel disappointed and bitter or something worse and so feel relieved and grateful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle ofyour character and aims.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.
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The French woman says, 'I am a woman and a Parisienne, and nothing foreign to me appears altogether human.'
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Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.
Ralph Waldo Emerson