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The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.

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
Differences
Quality
American
Thought
Austrian
Egyptian
Roman

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread
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Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.
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Science does not know its debt to imagination.
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To be great is to be misunderstood.
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We must be our own before we can be another's.
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A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat self control is the rule. Anger is an uncontrollable feeling that betrays what you are when you are not yourself. Anger is that powerful internal force that blows out the light of reason. Know this to be the enemy: it is anger, born of desire.
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If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.
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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
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We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones.
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Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
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Every really able man, in whatever direction he works - a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter - if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator?
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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.
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Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.
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Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words.
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What we seek we shall find what we flee from flees from us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.
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Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.
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Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. 'Tis the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior.
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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.
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