Quote

The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?

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
Looks
Terror
Shells
Cockney
Men
Active
Masculine
Cockneys
Like
Sea
Ecstasy
Alternating
Filled
Smooth
Ecstasies
Eternal
Circle
Cemetery
Type
Eggs
Drifting
Strength
Rough
Colored
Look
Circles
Conceit

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great men exist that there might be greater men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature hates calculators.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Tis the privilege of Art Thus to play its cheerful part, Man on earth to acclimate And bend the exile to his fate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Meet your failure nobly, and it will not differ from success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, so hot? my little Sir.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful and lovely, is degrading and futile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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People suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is impossible for a person to be cheated by anyone but himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The House ...She lays her beams in music, In music everyone, To the cadence of the whirling world Which dances around the sun- That so they shall not be displaced By lapses or by wars, But for the love of happy souls Outlive the newest stars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man is a god in ruins.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man becomes what he thinks about most of the time
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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The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are, --/ Never read a book that is not a year old./ Never read any but the famed books./ Never read any but what you like.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A good deal of our politics is physiological.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The lord is the peasant that was, The peasant is the lord that shall be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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An answer in words is delusive it is really no answer to the questions you ask.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Beauty rests on necessities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock aswell as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our age is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year.
Ralph Waldo Emerson