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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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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
Giver
Intellect
Law
Nature
Better
Good
Receiver
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
We know who is benevolent, by quite other means than the amount of subscriptions to soup-societies. It is only low merits that canbe enumerated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forgo all things for that,and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money is of no value it cannot spend itself. All depends on the skill of the spender.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man should give us a sense of mass.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous- looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap, dear house.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love should make joy but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is always a best way of doing everything.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat self-control is the rule.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but willpick and cavil, and tell the odious truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Knowledge exists to be imparted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do what you're afraid to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me 'that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.
Ralph Waldo Emerson