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Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
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
Wrongs
Condition
Conditions
Effort
Literature
Music
Men
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defenders, whether Luther, or William Penn, or St. Paul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is the dwarf of himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams, the soul lays the foundations of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual the wise man wonders at the usual.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man is grave alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some men love only to talk where they are masters. They like to go to school-girls, or to boys, or into the shops where the sauntering people gladly lend an ear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of tranquillity that religion is powerless to bestow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I honor health as the first Muse.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our strength grows out of our weakness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely thatwhich all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The vanishing, volatile froth of the present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson