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Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Age: 78 †
Born: 1803
Born: May 25
Died: 1882
Died: April 27
Biographer
Diarist
Essayist
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Every
Pure
Newton
Life
Wise
Misunderstood
Wisdom
Consistency
Pythagoras
Understanding
Reliance
Copernicus
Jesus
Luther
Galileo
Spirit
Flesh
Transcendentalism
Ever
Greatness
Inconsistency
Great
Took
Socrates

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Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.
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The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.
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He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.
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How much finer things are in composition than alone.
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He only is a well-made man who has a good determination.
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Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
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A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.
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The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.
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There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.
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Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.
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The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.
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Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.
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We are not free to use today, or to promise tomorrow, because we are already mortgaged to yesterday.
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What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.
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There are some men above grief and some men below it.
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Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
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We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
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