Quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson - page 26
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This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life depends upon one's actions.
Come, see the north-wind's masonry, Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, naught cares he For number or proportion.
Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?
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By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.
Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
Outside among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom.
Do not believe that possibly you can escape the reward of your action.
Good thoughts are no better than good dreams if you don't follow through.
Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.
Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.
Do not say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders, so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.
Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.
Always do what you are afraid to do.
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.
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The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind.
