Quote

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.

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
Hard
Achieve
Burn
Good
Effort
Require
Men
Public
Performance
Time
Age
Performances
Born
Satisfied
History
Easily
Arrive
Better
Soon
Aspire
Whole
Beyond
Cheap

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Slavery it is that makes slavery freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.
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Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.
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Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society. ... Society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do.
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[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.
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For the resolute and determined, there is time and opportunity.
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The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure.
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Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too.
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A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
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One can never truly savor success until first tasting adversity.
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In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also as the green grass.
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There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.
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Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
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Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player.
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Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.
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There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.
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Anger is that powerful internal force that blows out the light of reason.
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Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.
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All natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.
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Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.
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The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson