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a good reader makes a good book

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
Book
Good
Reader
Makes

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve anyone it must husband its resources to live. But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What is originality? It is being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great men are sincere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The whole of what we know is a system of compensation. Every defect in one manner is made up in another. Every suffering is rewarded every sacrifice is made up every debt is paid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also as the green grass.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every word was once a poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Music is the poor man's Parnassus.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Take the place and attitude to which you see your unquestionable right, and all men acquiesce.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me 'that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The last change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample borrowers of eternity they are!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As long as civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson