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Life is too short to waste.

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
Waste
Short
Humanity
Life

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Be an opener of doors
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Every word was once a poem.
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In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock aswell as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt.
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The peace of the man who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace, but a canting impotence.
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To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.
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But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.
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If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Oversoul is before Time, and Time, Father of all else, is one of his children.
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Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.
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Genius is power, talent is applicability.
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What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
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A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
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The power of a man increases steadily by continuing in one direction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When the man is at home, his standing in society is well known and quietly taken but when he is abroad, it is problematical, and is dependent on the success of his manners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual
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To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be madeby the reception of beautiful sentiments.
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It is not the irregular hours or irregular diet that makes the romantic life.
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