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When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else.
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
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Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Thought
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Men
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not be caught by the sensational in nature, as a coarse red-faced sunset, a garrulous waterfall, or a fifteen thousand foot mountain... avoid prettiness - the word looks much like pettiness - and there is but little difference between them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every bystander to take his part.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God you shall not have both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, so hot? my little Sir.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, forthat is a way of receiving it from ourselves but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is and to remold it nearer the heart's desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only those books come down which deserve to last . All the gilt edges, vellum and morocco, all the presentation copies to all the libraries will not preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Guard your own spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman - repose in energy. The Greek battle pieces are calm the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some will always be above others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson