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Life has a way of demanding that you live it.

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
Demanding
Live
Way
Life

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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'Well,' said Red Jacket [to someone complaining that he had not enough time], 'I suppose you have all there is.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is dainty to be sick if you have leisure and convenience for it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It all begins when the soul would have its way with you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are a transfusion takes place he is you, and you are he then is a teaching and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are always getting ready to live but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I didn't find my friends the good Lord gave them to me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Obedience alone gives the right to command.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as spiritual life, God, soul, cross, etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In Nature, all is useful, all is beautiful
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The virtue in most request is conformity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.
Ralph Waldo Emerson