Quote

I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.

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
Youth
Difference
Differences
Disparity
Age
Courts
Whether
Fatal
Find
Muse
Great
Ugly
Court

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The multitude of false churches accredits the true religion.
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Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.
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A day is a miniature eternity.
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It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.
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Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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My good hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to bite my enemies. In the smoothing the rough hillocks, I smooth my temper.
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Friends should be like books, easy to find when you need them, but seldom used.
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The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe.
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A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.
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Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.
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The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.
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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.
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He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
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Skepticism? Yes, but a saint is a skeptic once in twenty-four hours.
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If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.
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There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron show,--the rootsof all things are in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite.
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A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
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I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson