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If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.

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
Explained
Individual
History
Experience
Whole
Men

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Be an opener of doors
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I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.
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That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.
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Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.
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The State is our neighbors our neighbors are the State.
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It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no person can sincerely try to help another without helping him or herself. Serve and you shall be served. If you love and serve people, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I DO not count the hours I spend In wandering by the sea The forest is my loyal friend, Like God it useth me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.
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Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.
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As long as any man exists, there is some need of him.
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I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Power educates the potentate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step downward, is a step upward. The man who renounceshimself, comes to himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these must.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I think no virtue goes with size.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations.
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That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say even though we may repeat the words ever so often.
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