Quote

Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him.

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
Great
Beauty
Shivering
Men
Poor
Adorn
Speak
Creature
Artist
Arts
Sense
Naked
Art
Warm
Seems
Creatures
Without
Becoming

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.
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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Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.
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There is a property in the horizon which no man has, but he whose eyes can integrate all the parts,--that is, the poet.
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Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census: property demands a government framedon the ratio of owners and of owning.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave and Wall-street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man of his word, aman of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity.
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Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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By God, I will not obey this filthy enactment!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
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Let us leave hurry to slaves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Books are the best of things if well used if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When all shoot at one mark, the gods join in the combat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.
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The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.
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I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson