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I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men.
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
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Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God had infinite time to give us.... He cut it up into a near succession of new mornings, and, with each, therefore, a new idea, new inventions, and new applications.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good criticism is very rare and always precious.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and... Nature, the sun and moon, the animals, the water and stones, which should be their toys.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Honor and fortune exist for him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People say law but they mean wealth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who does not sometimes envy the good and the brave, who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The eye is the painter and the ear the singer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson