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It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.
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
Judgment
Faculties
Self
Works
Fruits
Mean
Duty
Faculty
Good
Tree
Motive
Men
Secret
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Actions
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Fruit
Furnish
Action
Judging
Arriving
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair.
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Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
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Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.
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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.
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By virtue of the Deity thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with countless relations.
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All history is biography.
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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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In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
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A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams.
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We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.
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Love should make joy but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.
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Society cannot do without cultivated men. As soon as the first wants are satisfied, the higher wants become imperative.
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There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the characterwhich draws them.
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Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
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Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. What possesses interest for us is thenatural of each, his constitutional excellence. This is forever a surprise, engaging and lovely we cannot be satiated with knowing it, and about it and it is this which the conversation with Nature cherishes and guards.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts.
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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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Delicious is a just and firm encounter of two in a thought, in a feeling.
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The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.
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The secret in education lies in respecting the student.
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