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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

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
Littles
Philosophers
Nonconformity
Little
Philosopher
Adored
Mind
Foolish
Inconsistency
Silly
Statesmen
Minds
Foolishness
Divine
Misunderstood
Science
Consistency
Hobgoblin
Political
Reliance
Divines

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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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Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.
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The first wealth is health.
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Ability without honor has no value.
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Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
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To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a creditsystem in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man.
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I will not hide my tastes or aversions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions I will seek my own.
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No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.
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The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
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Every young man is prone to be misled by the suggestions of his own ill-founded ambition which he mistakes for the promptings of asecret genius, and thence dreams of unrivaled greatness.
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Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
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A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
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It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.
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The Buddhist, who thanks no man, who says Do not flatter your benefactors, but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.
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The best nations are those most widely related and navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer ofnations.
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Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .
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Great conversation ... requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
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It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.
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Man is the will, and woman the sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment the sail when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail.
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Every day, the sun and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?
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