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Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Age: 78 †
Born: 1803
Born: May 25
Died: 1882
Died: April 27
Biographer
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Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let no one honour me with tears, or bury me with lamentation. Why? Because I fly hither and thither, living in the mouths of me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with blessings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When we can't piece together the puzzle of our own lives, remember the best view of a puzzle is from above. Let Him help put you together.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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America is another name for opportunity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,--and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial they are notequal to the work they pretend. They lose their way in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is and to remold it nearer the heart's desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
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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People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson