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For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream neither is it a disease but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.

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
Stand
Born
Mother
Impunity
Cannot
Existing
Dream
Treated
World
Ground
Neither
Disease

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams, the soul lays the foundations of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Daughter of heaven and earth, coy Spring, With sudden passion languishing, Teaching barren moors to smile, Painting pictures mile on mile, Holds a cup of cowslip wreaths Whence a smokeless incense breathes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everythingthey give. I look bigger, but am less I have more clothes, but am nit so warm more armor, but less courage more books, but less wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wherever the truth is injured, defend it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Bhagavad-Gita is an empire of thought and in its philosophical teachings Krishna has all the attributes of the full-fledged montheistic deity and at the same time the attributes of the Upanisadic absolute.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let us learn the meaning of economy. Economy is a high human office,--a sacrament when its aim is grand, when it is the prudence of simple tastes, when it is practised for freedom or for love or devotion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, culture corrects the theory of success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,--when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To believe in luck ... is skepticism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson