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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
Good
Added
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Performers
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Speed
Walking
Skating
Beauty
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The laws of light and of heat translate each other-so do the laws of sound and colour and so galvanism, electricity and magnetism are varied forms of this selfsame energy.
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The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual.
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We are not free to use today, or to promise tomorrow, because we are already mortgaged to yesterday.
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Nothing can be more delicate without being fantastical, nothing more firm and based in nature and sentiment, than the courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes.
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The powers of the Soul are commensurate with its needs.
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Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.
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We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.
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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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Live in the fields, and God will give you lectures on natural philosophy every day.
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I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.
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A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.
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If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines but meet on what common ground remains,--if onlythat the sun shines, and the rain rains for both the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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You must treat the days respectfully, you must be a day yourself, and not interrogate it like a college professor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold it's great proportions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it.
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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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson