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Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

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
Solve
Private
Shall
Opinion
Age
Problem
Every
Privacy
Reform

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Every day, the sun and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy.
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In England every man you meet is some man's son in America, he may be some man's father.
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The world exists for the education of each man.
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If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment that was older and awaited expectant these larger insights.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Character is always known. Thefts never enrich alms never impoverish murder will speak out of stone walls.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven depending on whether they compare it to something better and so feel disappointed and bitter or something worse and so feel relieved and grateful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We stand against fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to a man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds it new and bigger.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I unsettle all things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The true poem is the poet's mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For, truly speaking, whoever provokes me to a good act or thought has given me a pledge of his fidelity to virtue,--he has come under the bonds to adhere to that cause to which we are jointly attached.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When there is sympathy, there needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise,--so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother.
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Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct that every honour is desert that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson