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

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Persecution readily knits friendship between its victims.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Lose yourself in nature and find peace
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Knowledge is the antidote to fear. [especially as fear often stands for false evidence appearing real!]
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ever fresh the broad creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds, A single will, a million deeds.
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Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Sun is the sole inconsumable fireAnd God is the sole inexhaustible Giver.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For splendor, there must somewhere be rigid economy. That the head of the house may go brave, the members must be plainly clad, and the town must save that the State may spend.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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'Well,' said Red Jacket [to someone complaining that he had not enough time], 'I suppose you have all there is.'
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There are two laws discreteNot reconciled,Law for man, and law for thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Not gold, but only man can make a people great and strong men who, for truth and honor's sake, stand fast and suffer long.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson