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He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.
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
Deed
Deeds
Action
Doe
Mean
Good
Ennobled
Contracted
Instantly
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
An individual has a healthy personality to the exact degree to which they have the propensity to look for the good in every situation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We know who is benevolent, by quite other means than the amount of subscriptions to soup-societies. It is only low merits that canbe enumerated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways, I keep and pass and turn again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterwards.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything in our world, even a drop of dew, is a microcosm of the universe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Do your thing, and I shall know you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Improve your spare moments and they will become the brightest gems in your life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beside all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer's profession, when a man enters it considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's home, could suggest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
