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Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.

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
Mind
State
Swag
Fact
Swagger
Spiritual
Presenting
Natural
Described
Facts
Symbol
Nature
Symbols
States
Appearance
Every
Picture
Corresponds

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.
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Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.
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We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them
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The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet
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Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.
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Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.
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The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.
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Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?
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A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude.
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The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
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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
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I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten even so, they have made me.
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Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight that they are incredulous of a man's habitual preference of the general good to his own but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
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Only those books come down which deserve to last . All the gilt edges, vellum and morocco, all the presentation copies to all the libraries will not preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.
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There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.
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Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,-must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron show,--the rootsof all things are in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The eye is the painter and the ear the singer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson