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Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.
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
Real
Slavery
Never
Wrote
World
Greatness
Cannot
Feigned
Stills
Iliad
Still
Abolished
May
Pretension
Back
Authenticity
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man can have society upon his own terms.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we must obey.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem the shepherd, his lamb the farmer, corn the miner, a stone the painter, his picture the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I didn't find my friends the good Lord gave them to me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The eye is the painter and the ear the singer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would be criminal which told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startles out wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You must let go of a thing for a new one to come to you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
So far as a person thinks they are free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not a ray is dimmed, not an atom worn nature's oldest force is as good as new.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If with love thy heart has burned If thy love is unreturned Hide thy grief within thy breast, Though it tear thee unexpressed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
