Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
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To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
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The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
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Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
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We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.
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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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The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
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Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
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Revolutions go not backward.
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To be great is to be misunderstood.
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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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Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
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The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
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Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
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Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
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Fear not, then, thou child infirm, There's no god dare wrong a worm.
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Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?
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Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
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Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.
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Always do what you are afraid to do.
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Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
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People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
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Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities.
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They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.