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We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

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
Book
Books
Four
Volume
Five
Civil
Reading
Sentences
Turns
Golden
Actually
Pages
Read
Hundred
Funny
Turn

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends her all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment.
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Necessity does everything well.
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It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.
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The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.
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Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain. The mind does not create what it perceives, anymore than the eye creates the rose.
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There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.
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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.
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No matter how often defeated, you are born to victory.
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Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.
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Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.
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Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it
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Insist on yourself. Never imitate.
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My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.
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Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.
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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
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The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that, if you let it alone, it will let you alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When it is dark enough, men see the stars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson