Quote

When the vain speaker has sat down, and the people say 'what a good speech,' it still takes an ounce to balance an ounce.

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
Thinking
Sat
People
Vain
Speech
Balance
Takes
Stills
Ounce
Still
Speaker
Good
Speakers

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.
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Isolation must precede true society.
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Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
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Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.
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The only prudence in life is concentration.
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Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.
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What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.
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Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.
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Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.
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Ever fresh the broad creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds, A single will, a million deeds.
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When it's dark enough men see stars.
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Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight that they are incredulous of a man's habitual preference of the general good to his own but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration.
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Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never opened there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.
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The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by redemption of the soul.
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[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.
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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.
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Whom God has put asunder, why should man put together?
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If we walk in the woods, we must feed mosquitoes.
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