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I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.

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
Genius
Wife
Father
Mother
Shun
Calls
Brother

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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To Be is to live with God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The value of a dollar is to buy just things a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth more than a dollar in a jail in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in constant play.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism... It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The power of a man increases steadily by continuance in one direction. He becomes acquainted with the resistances and with his own tools increases his skill and strength and learns the favorable moments and favorable accidents.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Cupid is a casuist, a mystic, and a cabalist,-- Can your lurking thought surprise, And interpret your device, . . . . All things wait for and divine him,-- How shall I dare to malign him?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with blessings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The unbelief of the age is attested by the loud condemnation of trifles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The interminable forests should become graceful parks, for use and delight.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world is his who can see through its pretension.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.
Ralph Waldo Emerson