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A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
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
Mark
Soon
Thoughts
Learned
Learning
Use
Awkwardness
Become
Borrowed
Certain
Marks
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Gold and iron are good To buy iron and gold.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A beautiful woman is a practical poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let a man behave in his own house as a guest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is curious that Christianity, which is idealism, is sturdily defended by the brokers, and steadily attacked by the idealists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
