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Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.
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
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Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Exaggerating
Exaggeration
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Vice
Vices
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The aid we can give each other is only incidental, lateral, and sympathetic.
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Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.
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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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Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange ofgood offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
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The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God has delegated himself to a million deputies.
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He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
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That which we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The end of being is to know and if you say, the end of knowledge is action,-why, yes, but the end of that action again, is knowledge.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In England every man you meet is some man's son in America, he may be some man's father.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Go, speed the stars of Thought On to their shining goals - The sower scatters broad his seed, The wheat thou strew'st be souls.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Doing well is a result of doing good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
