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Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

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
Stanza
Outweighs
Prose
Poetry
Single
Makes
Book

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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That man is idle who can do something better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Not in his goals but in his transitions, man is great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To Be is to live with God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A little praise goes a great ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let every man shovel out his own snow and the whole city will be passable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first for example, a well-laid garden and nothing seems worth doing but the laying~out of gardens.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When we see a special reformer we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your own virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?
Ralph Waldo Emerson