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Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

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
Converted
Thrive
Perception
Character

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Don't be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don't bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Find the journey's end in every step.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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So far as a person thinks they are free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something ... he learns his ignorance, is cured of the insanity of conceit has got moderation and real skill.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is short but there is always time for courtesy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
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For all symbols are fluxional all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. He only is right who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded by worry, fret and anxiety. Finish every day, and be done with it. You have done what you could.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our strength grows out of our weakness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson