Quote

All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us in other words, to engage us to obey.

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
Soul
Way
Aims
Obey
Engage
Aim
Reform
Particular
Words

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat self control is the rule. Anger is an uncontrollable feeling that betrays what you are when you are not yourself. Anger is that powerful internal force that blows out the light of reason. Know this to be the enemy: it is anger, born of desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The course of everything goes to teach us faith.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I would study, I would know, I would admire forever.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other you shall not see the face of man you shall not hear any name the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world is the ring of his spells, And the play of his miracles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread and meat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The religion which is to guide and fulfill the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is one soul which animates all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web.
Ralph Waldo Emerson