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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
Poet
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Expression
Reference
Asks
Arguments
Thought
Helpless
Mean
Delight
Men
Dare
Think
Argument
Thinking
Telling
Evidence

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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When the night is darkest, the stars come out.
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I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
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Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never shines in which this element may not work.
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The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.
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The last change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air.
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A divine person is the prophecy of the mind a friend is the hope of the heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.
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It is the eye which makes the horizon.
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The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves the man is lost.
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So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the Chancellors of God.
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But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.
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An eminent teacher of girls said, the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When some external event raises your spirits and you think good days are preparing for you, do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take anything seriously all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very badcompany, and was never invited to dinner.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We pass for what we are.
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Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is sublime to think and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus and thus, I know it was right.
Ralph Waldo Emerson