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

More quotes by 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
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Blessed are those who have no talent!
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Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Science does not know its debt to imagination.
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Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The teaching of politics is that the Government, which was set for protection and comfort of all good citizens, becomes the principal obstruction and nuisance with which we have to contend... The cheat and bully and malefactor we meet everywhere is the Government.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The democrat is a young conservative the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature ever faithful is To such as trust her faithfulness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth it is the beginning of wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player.
Ralph Waldo Emerson