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I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

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
Upright
Rude
Vital
Ought
Ways
Speak
Truth
Way

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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.
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The aid we can give each other is only incidental, lateral, and sympathetic.
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The boxer's ring is the enjoyment of the part of society whose animal nature alone has been developed.
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A weed is a plant we've found no use for yet.
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The beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey, it will yield us bees.
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The secret is the answer to all that has been, all that is, and all that will ever be.
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All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us in other words, to engage us to obey.
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The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
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The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.
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The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.
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A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
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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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Literature is eavesdropping.
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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.
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Man sheds grief as his skin sheds rain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Spring still makes spring in the mind When sixty years are told: Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, And we are never old Over the winter glaciers I see the summer glow And through the wind-piled snowdrift The warm rosebuds below.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The last change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air.
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Tis the good reader that makes the good book in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
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I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose.
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