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If you act, you show character if you sit still, you show it if you sleep you show it.

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
Character
Still
Sleep
Show
Shows
Stills

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.... Build, therefore, your own world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Self sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everythingthey give. I look bigger, but am less I have more clothes, but am nit so warm more armor, but less courage more books, but less wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life,--do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or your child.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
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I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Half a man's wisdom goes with his courage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God you shall not have both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson