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Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities?

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
Charity
Charities
Dinner
Beggar
Hundred
Quotations
Literature
Custom
Art
Borrowed
Body
Imitation
Life
Customs
Like
Chinese
Eavesdropping

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When there is sympathy, there needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise,--so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the intimated purpose, express character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Hume's doctrine was that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not that the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Pay no heed to the average photographer's remarks upon flat and weak negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale, and unprofitable your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy. ... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye it transcends speech it is the bodily symbol of identity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Genius is power, talent is applicability.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and... Nature, the sun and moon, the animals, the water and stones, which should be their toys.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.
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What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The great will not condescend to take anything seriously.
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A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.
Ralph Waldo Emerson