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Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.

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
Every
Intellectual
Traced
Moral
Borrowed
Word
Root
Fact
Appearance
Language
Express
Facts
Material
Found
Roots
Used
Materials

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The uses of travel are occasional, and short but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation and this is a main function of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We ascribe beauty to that which is simple which has no superfluous parts which exactly answers its end which stands related to all things which is the mean of many extremes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Manners are the happy ways of doing things each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step downward, is a step upward. The man who renounceshimself, comes to himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Character is that which can do without success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every body we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
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How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself when he loses himself in the crowd when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All life is an experiment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson