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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
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Every
Catchy
Reform
Private
Opinion

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
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. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each ofthese works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken that act or step is the spiritual act all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Teaching is the perpetual end and office of all things. Teaching, instruction is the main design that shines through the sky and earth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Yet America is a poem in our eyes its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is a rag merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Everything that is popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of philosophers: and this is for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any worth in itself, yet it characterizes the people.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Rude poets of the tavern hearth, squandering your unquoted mirth, which keeps the ground, and never soars, while jake retorts, and reuben roars tough and screaming, as birch-bark, goes like bullet to its mark while the solid curse and jeer never balk the waiting ear.
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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Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of SHAKSPEARE's wit. The men who lived with him became Poets, for the air was fame.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and... Nature, the sun and moon, the animals, the water and stones, which should be their toys.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Music is the poor man's Parnassus.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson