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Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.

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
Life
Appearances
Prudence
Inward
Appearance
Senses
Virtue
Science
Action

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.
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I will not live out of me I will not see with others' eyes My good is good, my evil ill I would be free.
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A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat self-control is the rule.
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The Englishman who has lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart.
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Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory.
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Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.
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He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
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Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. 'Tis the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior.
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Tis the good reader that makes the good book a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
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The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory.
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Never read any book that is not a year old.
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Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far.
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Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors.
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Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason.
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.
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Man was born to be rich, or to inevitably grow rich, by the use of his faculties: by the union of thought with nature.
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Insist on yourself. Never imitate.
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We are disgusted by gossip yet it is of importance to keep the angels in their proprieties.
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Science, Nature,-O, I've yearned to open some page.
Ralph Waldo Emerson