"We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them"
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 102 of 211)
4.2K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection."
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"The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land."
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"So . . . I feel in regard to this aged England . . . pressed upon by transitions of trade and . . . competing populations,-I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before;-indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that, in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon."
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"If you would not be known to do anything, never do it."
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"Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration."
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"The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought."
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"The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness."
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"Those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was something finer in the man, than anything which he said."
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"Art is the path of the creator to his work."
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"Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun."
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"In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present."
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"For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought."
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"We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are."
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"Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet."
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"No man can help another without helping himself."
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"Some men, at the approach of a dispute, neigh like horses."
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"The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams."
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"A man often pays dear for a small frugality."
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"Every natural action is graceful."
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