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

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Life itself is ... a sleep within a sleep.
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For, whom the Muses smile upon, And touch with soft persuasion, His words like a storm-wind can bring Terror and beauty on their wing In his every syllable Lurketh nature veritable.
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Nature is a frugal mother, and never gives without measure. When she has work to do, she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped.
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We expect a great man to be a good reader.
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It is sublime to think and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus and thus, I know it was right.
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A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
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The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.
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The difference between talent and genius is in the direction of the current: in genius, it is from within outward in talent from without inward.
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Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
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The inmost in due time becomes the outmost.
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I think all men know better than they do know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles but they darenot trust their presentiments.
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The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
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The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.
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If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
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There is no man of Nature's worth In the circle of the earth.
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Power is the first good.
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First be a good animal.
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The task ahead of us is never as great as the power behind us.
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I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.
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Beside all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer's profession, when a man enters it considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's home, could suggest.
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