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The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity.

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
Blows
Towers
Direction
Blow
University
Gives
Retrospective
Must
Gale
Giving
Antiquity

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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It is sublime to think and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus and thus, I know it was right.
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No nation has produced anything like his equal. There is no quality in the human mind, there is no class of topics, there is no region of thought, in which he has not soared or descended, and none in which he has not said the commanding word.
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Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
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Instead of making Christianity a vehicle of truth, you make truth only a horse for Christianity.
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The great will not condescend to take anything seriously.
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Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks he is free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact thatall nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.
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He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.
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Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave.
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Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.
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An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.
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Daughter of heaven and earth, coy Spring, With sudden passion languishing, Teaching barren moors to smile, Painting pictures mile on mile, Holds a cup of cowslip wreaths Whence a smokeless incense breathes.
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The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.
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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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Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Whatever limits us we call fate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?
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.
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The poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.
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[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson