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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
Precious
Criticism
Good
Always
Rare

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Let him be great, and love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the insane levity of choosing associates by others eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Slavery it is that makes slavery freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and...it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path.... He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The highest end of government is the culture of men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The interminable forests should become graceful parks, for use and delight.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is a greater joy to see the author's author, than himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds,--epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them they will never forget it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men do not believe in the power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Be a gift and a benediction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I like people who like Plato.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I pay the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys that educate my son.
Ralph Waldo Emerson