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I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called history is.
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
Tale
Shallow
Village
Ashamed
Tales
Called
History
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The laws of light and of heat translate each other-so do the laws of sound and colour and so galvanism, electricity and magnetism are varied forms of this selfsame energy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The desire of gold is not for gold. It is not the love of much wheat, and wool and household stuff. It is the means of freedom and benefit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man for whom the law exists - the man of forms, the conservative - is a tame man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forgo all things for that,and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious from thesleep of passions to their rage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In these divine pleasures permitted to me of walks in the June night under moon and stars, I can put my life as a fact before me and stand aloof from its honor and shame.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful and lovely, is degrading and futile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson