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We expect a great man to be a good reader.

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
Lovers
Expect
Reader
Book
Great
Good
Men

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a creditsystem in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is not an arbitrary decree of God, but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
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The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For the resolute and determined, there is time and opportunity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion,not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
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I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Humility is the secret of the wise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Self reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The true poem is the poet's mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We learn that God IS that he is in me and that all things are shadows of him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We shun the rugged battle of fate where strength is born.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual the wise man wonders at the usual.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I like man, but not men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I covet truth beauty is unripe childhood's cheat I leave it behind with the games of youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world is nothing, the man is all in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation when memory came, it was experience when mind acted, it was knowledge when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson