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The highest proof of civility is that the whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the greatest number.
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
Greatest
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Securing
State
Civility
Action
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States
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Numbers
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In spite of warnings, change rarely occurs until the status quo becomes more painful than change. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can take better care of your secret than another can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pride is handsome, economical pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is better to suffer injustice than to do it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Sun is the sole inconsumable fireAnd God is the sole inexhaustible Giver.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Power is the first good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear. It is the storm within which endangers him[,] not the storm without.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Language is the archives of history.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent, bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that fret my leaves. Such a one has curculios, borers, knife-worms a swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the intimated purpose, express character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
