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What matters most is not what is behind us or before us, but what is within us.

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
Matter
Matters
Behinds
Behind
Within

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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There are men whose language is strong and defying enough, yet their eyes and their actions ask leave of other men to live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But hospitality must be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.
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People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Such is the active power of good temperament! Great sweetness of temper neutralizes such vast amounts of acid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is noticed, that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind, and an indifferenceto death.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every stoic was a stoic but in Christendom where is the Christian?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The best of life is conversation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Why should the way I feel depend on the thoughts in someone else's head?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are always getting ready to live but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson