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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There is no great and no small To the Soul that maketh all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What you persist in doing gets easier. The task hasn't changed, but your ability to do it has increased.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Love should make joy but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Excite the soul, and the weather and the town and your condition in the world all disappear the world itself loses its solidity, nothing remains but the soul and the Divine Presence in which it lives.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The secret is the answer to all that has been, all that is, and all that will ever be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health he must be at the top of his condition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Science, Nature,-O, I've yearned to open some page.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange, extravagant and broken the monotony.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Commonsense is the wick of the candle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson