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Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.
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
Echoes
Friendship
Friend
Side
Sides
Better
Nettle
Nettles
Echo
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us, but makes us intellectual beings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
O Lord! Unhappy is the man whom man can make unhappy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very badcompany, and was never invited to dinner.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Successful is the person who has lived well, laughed often and loved much, who has gained the respect of children, who leaves the world better than they found it, who has never lacked appreciation for the earth's beauty, who never fails to look for the best in others or give the best of themselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we call results are beginnings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man was born to be rich, or to inevitably grow rich, by the use of his faculties: by the union of thought with nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I pay the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys that educate my son.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles. Meantime, within man, is the soul of the whole the wise silence the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related the eternal One.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Education should be as broad as man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
