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The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Age: 78 †
Born: 1803
Born: May 25
Died: 1882
Died: April 27
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Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We sometimes meet an original gentleman, who, if manners had not existed, would have invented them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret is the answer to all that has been, all that is, and all that will ever be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not Devil's wine, but God's wine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The eye is the painter and the ear the singer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God enters by a private door into every individual.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is with a good book as it is with good company.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Test of the poet is knowledge of love, For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove Never was poet, of late or of yore, Who was not tremulous with love-lore.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Instead of making Christianity a vehicle of truth, you make truth only a horse for Christianity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
