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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
Great
Misunderstood
Must

More quotes by 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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Whatever limits us we call fate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are thevictims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society, let life be fair and poetic, and the scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens, and philanthropists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The secret of drunkenness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If a man lose his balance, and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cultivated man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Lawyers are a prudent race though not very fond of liberty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply,- 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each ofthese works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken that act or step is the spiritual act all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.
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
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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