Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Destiny
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The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
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As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes.
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The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
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There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us?
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Enlarge not thy destiny, said the oracle: endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge.
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To wade in marshes and sea margins is the destiny of certain bird, and they are so accurately made for this that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.
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Art and power will go on as they have done,--will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time.
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They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.
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Man is made of the same atoms the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure.
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We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns.
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Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.
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The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration.
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Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places.
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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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If we must accept fate we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.
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If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.
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Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
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The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.
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I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town whichwas appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.
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We stand against fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to a man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds it new and bigger.
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Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks he is free.
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Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.
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Men of extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, "Not unto us, not unto us." According to the faith of their times, they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to their eye their deed.
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Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.
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The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.
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