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When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.
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
Language
Helpless
Thought
Fools
Describe
Define
Attempt
Desert
God
Fool
Savages
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists - talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men are poets at heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thought makes everything fit for use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Speech is better than silence silence is better than speech.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All promise outruns performance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a dog is chasing after you, whistle for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startles out wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No facts are to me sacred none are profane I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The last change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are two laws discreteNot reconciled,Law for man, and law for thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
