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Every man's task [his 'great dream' and impassioned life-goal] is his life preserver.

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
Dream
Great
Every
Preserver
Men
Impassioned
Life
Anticipation
Task
Tasks
Goal

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let us make education brave and preventive. Politics is an afterwork, a poor patching. We are always a little late... We shall one day learn to supercede politics by education... We must begin higher up, namely in Education.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man becomes what he thinks about most of the time
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible archetype.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am Defeated all the time, yet to Victory I am born.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The life of man is a self-evolving circle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The democrat is a young conservative the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Go out of the house to see the moon, and't is mere tinsel it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man complained that on his way home to dinner he had every day to pass through that long field of his neighbor's. I advised him to buy it, and it would never seem long again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Religion must always be a crab fruit it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways, I keep and pass and turn again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Things bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Justice satisfies everybody, and justice alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson