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An actually existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel.

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
Importance
Actually
Important
Existing
Possibly
Angel

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If you don't ride in the rain, you don't ride.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Genius is saying what is in your heart, because it's in everyone's heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The only thing that can grow is the thing you give energy to.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist meeting-house.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day and cost us nothing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A forte always makes a foible.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
Ralph Waldo Emerson