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Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.
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
Endless
Lessons
Suffering
Pain
Also
Sterility
Great
Ennui
Indolence
Lesson
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The vanishing, volatile froth of the present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine,--and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he ispraised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the spirit is not master of the world, then it is its dupe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fate is unpenetrated causes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If it costs ten years, and ten to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The moral equalizes all enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. Under the whipof the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy only the precursor of the reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man is eloquent once in his life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Knowledge is the only elegance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
