Quote

Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.

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
Intimate
Pass
Moment
Yeast
Moments
Swallowed
Hands
Astonishment
Better
Abyss
Thinking
Lift
World
Lifts

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, forthat is a way of receiving it from ourselves but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am Defeated all the time, yet to Victory I am born.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.
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Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world exists for the education of each man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Religion must always be a crab fruit it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.
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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Let a man behave in his own house as a guest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Human society is made up of partialities. Each citizen has an interest and a view of his own, which, if followed out to the extreme, would leave no room for any other citizen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Each of us sees in others what we carry in our own hearts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no person can sincerely try to help another without helping him or herself. Serve and you shall be served. If you love and serve people, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson