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What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?
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
Men
Incongruous
Aggregate
Obeyed
Materials
City
Cities
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The affections cannot keep their youth any more than men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible archetype.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A little praise goes a great ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I will not hide my tastes or aversions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions I will seek my own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul unbelief in denying them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of lower states, of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universalmovements of the soul, he hideth they are incalculable. I can know that truth is divine and helpful but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,--a long way leading nowhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
