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Literature is eavesdropping.

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
Eavesdropping
Literature

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The people are to be taken in very small doses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Don't set out to teach theism from your natural history... You spoil both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The soul is the perceiver and the revealer of truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The borrower runs in his own debt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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An expense of ends to means is fateMorganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat self-control is the rule.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What a new face courage puts on everything!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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By virtue of the Deity thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with countless relations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When the night is darkest, the stars come out.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Perhaps it is the lowest of the qualities of an orator, but it is, on so many occasions, of chief importance,--a certain robust and radiant physical health or--shall I say?--great volumes of animal heat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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a good reader makes a good book
Ralph Waldo Emerson