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The first lesson of history is that evil is good.

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
First
Good
Lesson
Lessons
Evil
History
Firsts

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The shows of the day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, andthe like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality.
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Your work should be in praise of what you love.
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Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.
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The mark of a man of the world is absence of pretension.
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We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies in our line of advance.
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Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.
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Our life seems not present, so much as prospective not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast- flowingvigor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.
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Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusades a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He needs no library, for he has not done thinking no church, for he is himself a prophet no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver no money, for he is value itself no road, for he is at home where he is.
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Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.
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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.
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The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Love is like wildflowers It's often found in the most unlikely places.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Speech is better than silence silence is better than speech.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson