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Men achieve a certain greatness unawares when working to another aim.
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
Achievement
Greatness
Achieve
Working
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Unawares
Men
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man is grave alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census: property demands a government framedon the ratio of owners and of owning.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is originality? It is being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are the prisoners of ideas.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only reward of virtue is virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
It is the eye which makes the horizon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Humility is the secret of the wise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Words are alive. Cut them and they bleed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Examples are cited by soldiers, of men who have seen the cannon pointed, and the fire given to it, and who have stepped aside from he path of the ball. The terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlour and the cabin.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.
Ralph Waldo Emerson