Quote

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

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
Certain
Glasses
Power
Capable
Men
Short
Rubbed
Time
Conditions
Favorable
Like
Wise
Permanently
Wisdom
Electricity
Company
Electric
Become
Acquire

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.
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The gates of thought, - how slow and late they discover themselves! Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open.
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Men who know the same things are not long the best company for each other.
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All promise outruns performance.
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In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?
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The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.
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Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.
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Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
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Convert life into truth.
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[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.
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These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.
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The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. Person makes event and event person.
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New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence.
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There is no calamity that right words will not begin to redress
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I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each ofthese works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken that act or step is the spiritual act all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.
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Knowledge is when you learn something new every day. Wisdom is when you let something go every day.
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But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.
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A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.
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Genius always finds itself a century too early.
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I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
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