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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
Understanding
Reliance
Copernicus
Jesus
Luther
Galileo
Spirit
Flesh
Transcendentalism
Ever
Greatness
Inconsistency
Great
Took
Socrates
Every
Pure
Newton
Life
Wise
Misunderstood
Wisdom
Consistency
Pythagoras

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Every wall is a door.
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A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.
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We put our love where we have put our labor.
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By God, I will not obey this filthy enactment!
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The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by redemption of the soul.
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There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth it is the beginning of wisdom.
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It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.
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Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
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The population of the world is a conditional population these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live there shall be a better, please God.
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The dice of God are always loaded.
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A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us.
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Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
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Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and...it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path.... He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.
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We animate what we can see, and we see only what we animate.
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The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world.
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There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.
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When it's dark enough men see stars.
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The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.
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The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.
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