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The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
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
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Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Life
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Useful
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Compassion
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Manners are the happy ways of doing things each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Begin and proceed on a settled conviction that but little is permitted to any man to do or to know, and if he complies with the first grand laws, he shall do well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a world of infinite choice people are struggling to figure out what to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. Always, always, always, always, always do what you are afraid to do. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Times are the masquerade of the eternities trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The history of reform is always identical it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
O Lord! Unhappy is the man whom man can make unhappy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I unsettle all things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age,—lasting as space and time,—embosomed in time and space.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterwards.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven depending on whether they compare it to something better and so feel disappointed and bitter or something worse and so feel relieved and grateful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am become a transparent eyeball.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
