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Good criticism is very rare and always precious.

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
Rare
Precious
Criticism
Good
Always

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart.
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A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Health, south wind, books, old trees, a boat, a friend.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What is there of the divine in a load of brick? What ... in a barber shop? ... Much. All.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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God screens us evermore from premature ideas.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven depending on whether they compare it to something better and so feel disappointed and bitter or something worse and so feel relieved and grateful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society is the stage on which manners are shown novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists - talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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By virtue of the Deity thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with countless relations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people.
Ralph Waldo Emerson