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Mankind divides itself into two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast the first a handful.

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
First
Classes
Vast
Behavior
Mankind
Second
Malefactors
Class
Benefactors
Two
Handful
Firsts
Divides

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.
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But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age isworth a fit of insanity, is it not?
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I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.
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Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.
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Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Solitary converse with nature for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion, the other, private opinion one, fame, the other, desert one, feats, the other, humility one, lucre, the other, love one, monopoly, and the other, hospitality of mind.
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Never read any book that is not a year old.
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We do what we can, and then make a theory to prove our performance the best.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.
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A friend is the hope of the heart.
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No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
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The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We pass for what we are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with blessings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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God enters by a private door into every individual.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Daughter of heaven and earth, coy Spring, With sudden passion languishing, Teaching barren moors to smile, Painting pictures mile on mile, Holds a cup of cowslip wreaths Whence a smokeless incense breathes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. What possesses interest for us is thenatural of each, his constitutional excellence. This is forever a surprise, engaging and lovely we cannot be satiated with knowing it, and about it and it is this which the conversation with Nature cherishes and guards.
Ralph Waldo Emerson