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All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.

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
Generalized
Individualism
Private
Public
Facts
Individualized

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Love is like a hunter, who cares not for the game when once caught, which he may have pursued with the most intense and breathless eagerness. Love is strongest in pursuit friendship in possession.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We pass for what we are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Talent may frolic and juggle genius realizes and adds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A home kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All promise outruns performance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every time you wink the stars move.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky. ... These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sometimes we receive the power to say yes to life. Then peace enters us and makes us whole.
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