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Friends should be like books, easy to find when you need them, but seldom used.

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
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Seldom
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The history of reform is always identical it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great men exist that there might be greater men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Treat your friend as a spectacle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, so hot? my little Sir.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten even so, they have made me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Friendship is an order of nobility from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A home kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
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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Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am not so foolish as to declaim against forms. Forms are as essential as bodies but to exalt particular forms, to adhere to oneform a moment after it is outgrown, is unreasonable, and it is alien to the spirit of Christ.
Ralph Waldo Emerson