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Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function living is the functionary.

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
Functionary
Intellect
Function
Higher
Living
Character
Thinking

More quotes by 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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In dreams we are true poets we create the persons of the drama we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours and we listen with surprise to what they say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If we walk in the woods, we must feed mosquitoes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He is great who confers the most benefits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sitting back in the evening, stargazing and stroking your dog, is an infallible remedy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When a dog is chasing after you, whistle for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The virtue in most request is conformity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is saturated with Deity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let us make education brave and preventive. Politics is an afterwork, a poor patching. We are always a little late... We shall one day learn to supercede politics by education... We must begin higher up, namely in Education.
Ralph Waldo Emerson