"Private, accidental, confidential conversation breeds thought. Clubs produce oftener words."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 100 of 211)
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"People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little."
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"I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency."
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"We must set up a strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past and to come."
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"People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else."
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"It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement"
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"Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee, from the hill-top looking down; And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton tolling the bell at noon, Dreams not that great Napoleon Sto"
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"In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour."
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"In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended."
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"Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep."
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"The true ship is the ship builder."
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"You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his work will characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. If you make a picture or a statue, it sets the beholder in that state of mind you had when you made it. If you spend for show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it will so appear. We are all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and things themselves are detective."
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"This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life depends upon one's actions."
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"And striving to be Man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form."
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"Genius is intellect constructive."
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"Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow."
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"An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, monachism of the Hermit Anthony, the Reformation of Luther, Quakerism of Fox, Methodism of Wesley, abolition of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome;" and all history resolves itself easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep things under his feet."
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"The beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey, it will yield us bees."
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"When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune."
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"Knowledge exists to be imparted."
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