"Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of chance."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 28 of 211)
4.2K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Money is of no value; it cannot spend itself. All depends on the skill of the spender."
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"Stand guard at the portal of your mind."
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"Real action is in silent moments."
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"We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life."
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"Whatever limits us we call fate."
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"You think that your silence on certain topics, perhaps in the face of injustice, or unkindness, or mean-spiritedness, causes others to reserve judgement of you. Far otherwise; your silence utters very loud: you have no oracle to speak, no wisdom to offer, and your fellow men have learned that you cannot help them. Doth not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her voice? We would be well to do likewise."
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"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."
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"When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name; the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience."
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"He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety."
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"The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence."
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"Obedience alone gives the right to command."
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"Where dwells the religion? Tell me first where dwells electricity, or motion, or thought or gesture. They do not dwell or stay atall. Electricity cannot be made fast, mortared up and ended, like London Monument, or the Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep it fixed, as the English do with their things, forevermore; it is passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, a surprise, a secret which perplexes them, and puts them out."
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"Every body we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow?"
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"Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery."
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"The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul."
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"Fractures well cured make us more strong."
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"Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage."
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"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs."
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"Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres."
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