Quote

Tis the good reader that makes the good book a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

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
Seems
Reader
Book
Seem
Confidences
Every
Head
Amiss
Good
Reading
Passages
Read
Finds
Makes
Hidden
Else
Ears
Cannot
Meant

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible of the guidance of suitors.
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Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.
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Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.
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Stand guard at the portal of your mind.
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A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.
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Deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing.
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Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere.
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Art is the need to create but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.
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If the race is good, so is the place.
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All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
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An action is the perfection and publication of thought.
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Let every man shovel out his own snow and the whole city will be passable.
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The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
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Power is what they want, not candy-power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists, and all its resources might be well applied.
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If we walk in the woods, we must feed mosquitoes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is properly no history, only biography.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advancesto his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson