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We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true.

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
Good
Golden
Highest
Beauty
Call
True
Beautiful
Heartlessness
Mean
Escaping
Heart
Appears

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Everything intercepts us from ourselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is a frugal mother, and never gives without measure. When she has work to do, she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity. All men, all things, the state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are phantasms and unreal beside the sanctuary of the heart. With so much awe, with so much fear, let it be respected.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.
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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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the way of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All that can be done for you is nothing to what you can do for yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great is the art, Great be the manners, of the bard. He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number But, leaving rule and pale forethought, He shall aye climb For his rhyme. Pass in, pass in, the angels say
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wherever the truth is injured, defend it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Genius is saying what is in your heart, because it's in everyone's heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Get Health. No labor, effort nor exercise that can gain it must be grudged.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A Judge may be a farmer but he is not to geld his own pigs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson