Quote

What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?

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
Men
Lies
Justice
Lying
Born
Culture
Restorer
Truth
Reformer
Made
Reformers
Good
Diversity

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Every reform was once a private opinion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He needs no library, for he has not done thinking no church, for he is himself a prophet no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver no money, for he is value itself no road, for he is at home where he is.
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Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go, and is only right admirable when to all its beauty and speed a subserviency to the will, like that of walking, is added.
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What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.
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Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
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When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.
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We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, andfind a new and fervent sense as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, the italics are ours.
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The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
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The need for a rational consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
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The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In the morning a man walks with his whole body in the evening, only with his legs. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks Greek architecture is the perfect flowering of geometry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is commonly observed that a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and with the rapid wealth come rapid claims which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly dissipated.
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If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth it is the beginning of wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson