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The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment.

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
Self
Conversation
Good
Subjects
Qualification
Respect
Qualifications
Control
Emergencies
Moment
Lets
Moments
Companion
Art
Holds
Certain
Subject

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is upheld by antagonism.
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To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself nothing, but the triumph of principles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The need for a rational consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
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My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said that words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.
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The religion which is to guide and fulfill the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science.
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The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.
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The value of a dollar is to buy just things a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth more than a dollar in a jail in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in constant play.
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It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.
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Let no one honour me with tears, or bury me with lamentation. Why? Because I fly hither and thither, living in the mouths of me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Where the banana grows man is sensual and cruel.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In these divine pleasures permitted to me of walks in the June night under moon and stars, I can put my life as a fact before me and stand aloof from its honor and shame.
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Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Self-trust is the first secret of success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.
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A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected.
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The Buddhist, who thanks no man, who says Do not flatter your benefactors, but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.
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Do not spill thy soul in running hither and yon, grieving over the mistakes and the vices of others. The one person whom it is most necessary to reform is yourself.
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A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
Ralph Waldo Emerson