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

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Fashion understands itself good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure.
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A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.
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One single idea may have greater weight than all the men, animals, and machines for a century.
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For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.
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Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins
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Beauty brings its own fancy price, for all that a man hath will he give for his love.
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The laws of light and of heat translate each other-so do the laws of sound and colour and so galvanism, electricity and magnetism are varied forms of this selfsame energy.
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We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.
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There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
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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.
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No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
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Science does not know its debt to imagination.
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I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.
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There is always a best way of doing everything.
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In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.
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Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
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An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer.
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Every word was once a poem.
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Sitting back in the evening, stargazing and stroking your dog, is an infallible remedy.
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The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy.
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