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The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed.

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
Ripe
Seed
Seeds
Democrat
Gone
Aristocrat
Aristocracy

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He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation but he shuts the door of truth.
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Life has a way of demanding that you live it.
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How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself when he loses himself in the crowd when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.
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No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment.
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To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself nothing, but the triumph of principles.
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The true poem is the poet's mind.
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In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes.
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Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
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We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones.
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Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.
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Obedience alone gives the right to command.
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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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Every really able man, in whatever direction he works - a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter - if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator?
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Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.
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The goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subservessuch as we see in the sexual attraction.
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Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me.
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The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind.
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Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
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What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us, but makes us intellectual beings.
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The vanishing, volatile froth of the present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine.
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