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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
Poet
Genius
Instead
Fine
Reckoning
Odds
Criticize
Criticism

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Life is too short to waste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Want is a growing giant whom the coat of have was never large enough to cover.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I honor health as the first Muse.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,--no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our thinking is a pious reception.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself nothing, but the triumph of principles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson