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We can only obey our own polarity.

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
Polarity
Obey
Fate

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.
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Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
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Among provocative, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching.
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In America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity.
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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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If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called history is.
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The beautiful is never plentiful.
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When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.
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Thought is the blossom language the bud action the fruit behind it.
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The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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People wish to be settled only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
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Art is the need to create but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.
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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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Pride ruined the angels, Their shame them restores And the joy that is sweetest Lurks in stings of remorse.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.
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Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.
Ralph Waldo Emerson