"A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 82 of 211)
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"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars."
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"Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive."
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"Surely nobody would be a charlatan, who could afford to be sincere."
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"The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast."
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"Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet"
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"Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together; but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself."
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"Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber."
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"I have heard that death takes us away from ill things, not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man we pronounce the belief of immortality."
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"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."
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"The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain."
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"It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports."
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"All mankind love a lover."
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"Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State."
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"My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects."
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"Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it."
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"The greatest homage to truth is to use it."
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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day."
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"Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear."
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"Practice radical humility." He (or she)who masters the art of humility cannot be humiliated."
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