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[on Thoreau:] For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to truth itself.

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
Respect
Opinion
Truth
Thoreau
Body
Particle
Men
Homage
Particles
Solely
Opinions

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work , but the solidest thing we know.
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It is about your outlook towards life. You can either regret or rejoice.
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The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women and every brave heart must treat society asa child, and never allow it to dictate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society, to be sure, does not like this very well it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world he declares all to be unfit to be his companions it is very uncivil, nay, insulting Society will retaliate.
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Thought makes everything fit for use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?--or, prior to that, answer me this, Are you victimizable?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Looking at God instantly reduces our disposition to dissent from our brother.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, of the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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You cannot do a kindness too soon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?
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The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature, as we know her, is no saint.... She comes eating and drinking and sinning.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Delicious is a just and firm encounter of two in a thought, in a feeling.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him [H.D. Thoreau]. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is commonly observed that a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and with the rapid wealth come rapid claims which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly dissipated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson