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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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There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He, who loves the bristle of bayonets, only sees in their glitter what beforehand he feels in his hand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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God had infinite time to give us.... He cut it up into a near succession of new mornings, and, with each, therefore, a new idea, new inventions, and new applications.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply,- 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists - talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not Devil's wine, but God's wine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A little praise goes a great ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is a frugal mother, and never gives without measure. When she has work to do, she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I covet truth beauty is unripe childhood's cheat I leave it behind with the games of youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no person can sincerely try to help another without helping him or herself. Serve and you shall be served. If you love and serve people, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town whichwas appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.
Ralph Waldo Emerson