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The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

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
Natural
Imitator
Else
Inventor
Another
Doom
Music
Mediocrity
Come
Hopeless
Something
Charm
Men
Short
Beauty
Dooms

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Every man is a new method.
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I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.
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Solitary converse with nature for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!
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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
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Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.
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Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
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The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.
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The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.
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As soon as a child has left the room his strewn toys become affecting.
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The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
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Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
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Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed.
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We might as easily reprove the east wind, or the frost, as a political party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but stand for the defence of those interests in which they find themselves.
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Teach the children! It is painting in fresco.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.
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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Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson