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Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.
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
Looks
Grandly
Mind
Converse
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Converses
Catching
Simplicity
Literature
Word
Simple
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, andfind a new and fervent sense as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, the italics are ours.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am old, yet I look at wise men and see that I am very young. I look over those stars yonder, and into the myriads of the aspirant and ordered souls, and see I am a stranger and a youth and have yet my spurs to win. Too ridiculous are these airs of age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius is power, talent is applicability.
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 sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We flee away from cities, but we bring The best of cities, these learned classifiers, Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterwards.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am a willow of the wilderness, Loving the wind that bent me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, of the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who does not sometimes envy the good and the brave, who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We may be partial, but Fate is not.
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
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The mark of a man of the world is absence of pretension.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Power is what they want, not candy-power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists, and all its resources might be well applied.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
