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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
Shallow
Village
Ashamed
Tales
Called
History
Tale

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The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, All summer in the field, and all winter in the study. And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.
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Manners are the happy ways of doing things each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.
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Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
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A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.
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The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members
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Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
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Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!-it seems to say,-there is victory yet for all justice and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
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What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.
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Education should be as broad as man.
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My joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation.
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Between cultivated minds the first interview is the best.
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Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.
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That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.
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A cheerful intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough. For it indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained.
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For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.
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I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.
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We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!
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If you are wise, you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more.
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He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation but he shuts the door of truth.
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