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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
Actually
Important
Existing
Possibly
Angel
Importance

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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To Be is to live with God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize or accept another's dogmatism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Find the journey's end in every step.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man's actions are the picture book of his creeds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Dear to us are those who love us... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Good nature is stronger than tomahawks.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sorrow makes us all children again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I think all men know better than they do know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles but they darenot trust their presentiments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
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What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We walk alone in the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We animate what we can see, and we see only what we animate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Only that is poetry which cleanses and mans me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Among the map makers of each generation are the risk takers, those who see the opportunities, seize the moment and expand man's vision of the future
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The key to every man is his thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson