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To be great, you must be misunderstood

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
Misunderstood
Must
Great

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange ofgood offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Walking has the best value as gymnastics of the mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No facts are to me sacred none are profane I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let us make education brave and preventive. Politics is an afterwork, a poor patching. We are always a little late... We shall one day learn to supercede politics by education... We must begin higher up, namely in Education.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When the vain speaker has sat down, and the people say 'what a good speech,' it still takes an ounce to balance an ounce.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are not free to use today, or to promise tomorrow, because we are already mortgaged to yesterday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We animate what we can see, and we see only what we animate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Fractures well cured make us more strong.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for thesalvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No man has ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, andfind a new and fervent sense as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, the italics are ours.
Ralph Waldo Emerson