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In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.
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
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Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
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Analysis
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In spite of warnings, change rarely occurs until the status quo becomes more painful than change. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every individual strives to grow and exclude, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy. ... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye it transcends speech it is the bodily symbol of identity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy only the precursor of the reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life,--do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or your child.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You cannot institute, without peril of charlatanism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusades a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As soon as a child has left the room his strewn toys become affecting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every stoic was a stoic but in Christendom where is the Christian?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The virtue in most request is conformity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yet America is a poem in our eyes its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In imitation is a bit suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion,not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why needs a man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses, and places of amusement? Only for want of thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
