Quote

Do not spill thy soul in running hither and yon, grieving over the mistakes and the vices of others. The one person whom it is most necessary to reform is yourself.

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
Persons
Grieving
Soul
Vices
Person
Reform
Self
Mistakes
Necessary
Mistake
Hither
Running
Spill
Others
Spills

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, so hot? my little Sir.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.
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Duty grows everywhere--like children, like grass.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Things bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Cultivate an attitude of gratitude, of giving and forgiving. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The best picture makes us say, I am a painter also.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art.
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For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Though we love goodness and not stealing, yet also we love freedom and not preaching.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When all shoot at one mark, the gods join in the combat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not Devil's wine, but God's wine.
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The eye is the first circle the horizon which it forms is the second and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.
Ralph Waldo Emerson