Quote

Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being.

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
Choices
Solid
Law
Peaceful
Truth
Reputation
Every
Keeps
Men
Brings
Love
Loves
Suspense
Life
Choice
Respects
Highest
Repose

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.
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Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
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Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up
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Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.
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The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason visibly stream.
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There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?
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He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
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Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
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Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.
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And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.
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The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - Let there be truth between us two forevermore.
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I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
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For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
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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
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Between cultivated minds the first interview is the best.
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Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.
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But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends.
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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.
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Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.
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When it is dark enough, men see the stars.
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