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In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.

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
Mean
Works
Grope
Law
Conceived
Spiritual
Describing
Means
Existing
True
Definitions
Cannot
Invisible
Without
God
Real
Meaning
Executes

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The shows of the day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, andthe like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A garden is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg , and his whole body to irresistible destruction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Soul rules over matter. Matter may pass away like a mote in the sunbeam, may be absorbed into the immensity of God, as a mistis absorbed into the heat of the Sun--but the soul is the kingdom of God, the abode of love, of truth, of virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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You can take better care of your secret than another can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Imitation cannot go above its model.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All great men come out of the middle classes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused. In the progress ofthe character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a decreasing faith in propositions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let no one honour me with tears, or bury me with lamentation. Why? Because I fly hither and thither, living in the mouths of me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society. ... Society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Fate is unpenetrated causes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion, the other, private opinion one, fame, the other, desert one, feats, the other, humility one, lucre, the other, love one, monopoly, and the other, hospitality of mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson