Quote

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

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
Never
Society
Gains
Continual
Given
Fast
Advances
Art
Changes
Instincts
Else
Side
Civilized
Change
Loses
Acquire
Undergoes
Thing
Sides
Arts
Recedes
Every
Rich
Scientific
Acquires
Something
Taken
Instinct
Barbarous

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We live ruins amid ruins.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Be yourself no base imitator of another, but your best self.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All ages of belief have been great all of unbelief have been mean.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved time, which keeps her from him, is his chest the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every reform was once a private opinion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something ... he learns his ignorance, is cured of the insanity of conceit has got moderation and real skill.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.
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In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every time you wink the stars move.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.
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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Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The teaching of politics is that the Government, which was set for protection and comfort of all good citizens, becomes the principal obstruction and nuisance with which we have to contend... The cheat and bully and malefactor we meet everywhere is the Government.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I see my trees repair their boughs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Solitary converse with nature for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!
Ralph Waldo Emerson