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Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

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
Perception
Nature
Place
Much
Life
Glide
Threatened

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.
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Meet your failure nobly, and it will not differ from success.
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Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
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The Gods we worship write their names on our faces be sure of that. And a man will worship something ... That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.
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As long as any man exists, there is some need of him.
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The walking of Man is falling forwards.
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Isolation must precede true society.
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Homeopathy is insignificant as an act of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.
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The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world.
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The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.
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Be yourself no base imitator of another, but your best self.
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Earth's a howling wilderness, Truculent with fraud and force.
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The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.
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Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.
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We must be courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.
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Your actions speak so loud, I can't hear what you say.
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In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
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There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.
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The poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.
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Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.
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