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Every reform was once a private opinion.
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
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Reform
Private
Opinion
Every
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wouldst thou shut up the avenues of ill, Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The whole of what we know is a system of compensation. Every defect in one manner is made up in another. Every suffering is rewarded every sacrifice is made up every debt is paid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
That which we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I covet truth beauty is unripe childhood's cheat I leave it behind with the games of youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept or if you have slept or if you have head ache or sciatica or leprosy or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace and not pollute the morning.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Under every deep a lower deep opens.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man, who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the East loves infinity, the West delights in boundaries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
