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Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

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
Comes
Experience
Soul
Thing
Good
Active
World
Judgment
Value
Values

More quotes by 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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Sorrow makes us all children again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Was never secret history but birds tell it in the bowers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Earth endures Stars abide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!-it seems to say,-there is victory yet for all justice and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and...it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path.... He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Talent may frolic and juggle genius realizes and adds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great conversation ... requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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An expense of ends to means is fateMorganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For, the advantages which fashion values, are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson