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Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.

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
Every
External
Good
Heroic
Contempt
Finds
Lasts
Extol
Last
Prudent
Success
Measures
Also
Heroism

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.
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The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.
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Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
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Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.
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Revolutions go not backward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.
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Noblesse oblige or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity.
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Improve your spare moments and they will become the brightest gems in your life.
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You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.
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The virtue you would like to have, assume it is already yours, appropriate it, enter into the part and live the character just as the great actor is absorbed in... the part he plays.
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The house praises the carpenter.
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What torments of grief you endured, from evils that never arrived
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People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
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Do what you're afraid to do.
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A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.
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Eyes...They speak all languages.
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...man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the center of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man.
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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Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What matters most is not what is behind us or before us, but what is within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson