Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, - and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.
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I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.
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Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.
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Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
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All mankind love a lover.
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I wiped away the weeds and foam, And fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.
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It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
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It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
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There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
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It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
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I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find.
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There is properly no history; only biography.
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Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.
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We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
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A great man is always willing to be little.
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The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
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The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
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It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.
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The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
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People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.