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To believe in luck ... is skepticism.

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
Believe
Skepticism
Luck

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We sometimes meet an original gentleman, who, if manners had not existed, would have invented them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is too thin a screen the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Is there a difference? Yes. We are in harmony with nature, but never at peace.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Power ceases in the instant of repose it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes into expressive consciousness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effiminated by position of nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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My joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation.
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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Every young man is prone to be misled by the suggestions of his own ill-founded ambition which he mistakes for the promptings of asecret genius, and thence dreams of unrivaled greatness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life depends upon one's actions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Justice satisfies everybody, and justice alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me 'that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Do what you're afraid to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson