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It is time to be old To take in sail.

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
Sailing
Sail
Take
Time

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function living is the functionary.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Where there is no vision a people perish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We can only obey our own polarity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called history is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Tis the good reader that makes the good book in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Do not believe that possibly you can escape the reward of your action.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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How much of human life is lost in waiting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men do not believe in the power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Buddhist, who thanks no man, who says Do not flatter your benefactors, but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.
Ralph Waldo Emerson