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Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.
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
Beats
Merely
Cold
Evil
Like
Privation
Absolutes
Absolute
Beat
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Honor and fortune exist for him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every day, the sun and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment and even obstacles and opposition will but make us like the fabled specter-ships, which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man I meet is in some way my superior...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town whichwas appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything runs to excess every good quality is noxious if unmixed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each age, it is found, must write its own books or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
