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A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants.

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
Wants
Littles
Little
Feels
Men
Pursuit
Greatness

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Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and...it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path.... He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.
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I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.
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The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The universe is the externalization of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is no man of Nature's worth In the circle of the earth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.
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No facts are to me sacred none are profane I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.
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The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our nature, they act on us not at once, but in succession, andwe are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we have known, are here present, and many more than we see the world is full.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of tranquillity that religion is powerless to bestow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The true poem is the poet's mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange ofgood offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When a dog is chasing after you, whistle for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson