Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essayist, Philosopher, Poet

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a 19th-century American essayist and philosopher known for his ideas on individualism and nature, particularly in his work 'Self-Reliance.'

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Born
May 25, 1803
Died
April 27, 1882
Quotes
4.2K
Rank
#45

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Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 111 of 211)

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"We have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be but an easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private emperor a fee for services, as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a lawyer. If any man has talent for righting wrong, for administering difficult affairs, for counselling poor farmers how to turn their estates to good husbandry, for combining a hundred private enterprises to a general benefit, let him in the county- town, or in Court-street, put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, Governor, Mr. Johnson, Working king."

Leadership Kings Men
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"Live in the sunshine."

Sunshine
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"Government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves."

Strong Party Government
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"Fear is a great instructor."

Fear Instructors
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"You have a place to live in this world which no other man can occupy; hence no competitors."

Men World Places To Live
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"Man's life is a progress, not a station."

Life Happiness Men
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"When some external event raises your spirits and you think good days are preparing for you, do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself."

Believe Good Day Thinking
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"Each is liable to panic, which is exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination. Knowledge is the encourager, knowledge that takes fear out of the heart, knowledge and use, which is knowledge in practice. They can conquer who believe they can. It is he who has done the deed once who does not shrink from attempting again."

Believe Ignorance Knowledge
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"How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of heroic manners! We will pardon them the want of books, or arts, and even of gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember them!"

Art Book Hero
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"Wherever a man commits a crime, God finds a witness. Every secret crime has its reporter."

Men Secret Crime
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"Spring still makes spring in the mind When sixty years are told: Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, And we are never old Over the winter glaciers I see the summer glow And through the wind-piled snowdrift The warm rosebuds below."

Summer Spring Heart
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"We sometimes observe that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem tomeasure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented if you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations."

Children Book Arms
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"A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forgo all things for that,and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented."

Pain Self Saint
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"In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration; gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice."

Rainbow Brave Doubt
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"Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer."

Prayer Illumination Inward
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"You take a weakness and start making it stronger.. You don't have to build your strengths - that you already possess... It is your weakness that needs the exercise"

Encouragement Exercise Stronger
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"If the race is good, so is the place."

Race Ifs
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"Isolation must precede true society."

Solitude Isolation
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"The reward of commercial civilization is the ability to consume a never-ending array of products.There are limits beyond which commodities cannot be multiplied without preventing their consumers from affirming themselves through the exercise of their personal freedom.When market dependence reaches a certain threshold it deprives people of their power to live creatively and to act autonomously. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is expressed with difficulty."

Exercise Civilization People
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"Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit."

Nature Holiday Nymphs
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