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If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.

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
Criticize
Criticism
Poet
Genius
Instead
Fine
Reckoning
Odds

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.
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Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.
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There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth it is the beginning of wisdom.
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We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles. Meantime, within man, is the soul of the whole the wise silence the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related the eternal One.
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I think all men know better than they do know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles but they darenot trust their presentiments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.
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Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread and meat.
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The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.
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To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
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Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other you shall not see the face of man you shall not hear any name the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.
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God will not have his work made manifest by cowards
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All promise outruns performance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Character wants room must not be crowded on by persons, nor be judged from glimpses got in the press of affairs, or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as a great building.
Ralph Waldo Emerson