Quote

Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go, and is only right admirable when to all its beauty and speed a subserviency to the will, like that of walking, is added.

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
Beauty
Performer
Right
Admirable
Writing
Carries
Kind
Carrie
Good
Added
Would
Performers
Like
Speed
Walking
Skating

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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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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This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
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Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.
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He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
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The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation when memory came, it was experience when mind acted, it was knowledge when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.
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You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
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Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
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Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.
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The eye is easily frightened.
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Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.
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Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, of the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.
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The ocean is a large drop a drop is a small ocean.
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The soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
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Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
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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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.
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A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.
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The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
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Live well, learn plenty, laugh often, love much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson