"I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 105 of 211)
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"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."
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"Only poetry inspires poetry."
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"If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?"
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"The whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it."
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"My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine."
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"Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!"
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"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem."
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"Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none."
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"What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations."
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"If we live truly, we shall see truly."
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"Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored"
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"Let us advance on Chaos and the Dark"
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"Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer."
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"Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws."
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"A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness."
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"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it."
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"Music causes us to think eloquently."
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"Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world."
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"You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits."
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