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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
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion, the other, private opinion one, fame, the other, desert one, feats, the other, humility one, lucre, the other, love one, monopoly, and the other, hospitality of mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls. Him we flatter, him we feast, compliment, vote for, and will not contradict.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If you don't ride in the rain, you don't ride.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We walk alone in the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am a willow of the wilderness, Loving the wind that bent me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature tells every secret once.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Duty grows everywhere--like children, like grass.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock aswell as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sitting back in the evening, stargazing and stroking your dog, is an infallible remedy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive orbrute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson