"The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 173 of 211)
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"The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose ... We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight."
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"America is a country of young men."
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"Men are better than this theology."
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"I like man, but not men."
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"Never utter the truism but live it among men."
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"That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often."
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"But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time."
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"Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes into expressive consciousness."
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"Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time."
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"Genius is power, talent is applicability."
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"Solitude is naught and society is naught. Alternate them and the good of each is seen."
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"It is God in you that responds to God without, or affirms his own words trembling on the lips of another."
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"Why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy and every man is grave alone."
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"The intellect searches out the Absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other."
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"What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period."
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"Deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth."
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"Cultivate an attitude of gratitude, of giving and forgiving. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself."
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"I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page."
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"What is originality? It is being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are."
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