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It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'

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
Success
Toughness
Fear
Counsel
Inspirational
Discipline
Given
Positive
Young
Afraid
Persons
Challenges
Person
Heard
Always
High

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What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.
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The remedy for all blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure of crime, is love.
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I like people who like Plato.
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Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
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There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.
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They think him the best dressed man, whose dress is so fit for his use that you cannot notice or remember to describe it.
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We know who is benevolent, by quite other means than the amount of subscriptions to soup-societies. It is only low merits that canbe enumerated.
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The greatest discoveries are those that shed light unto ourselves.
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Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
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If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.
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No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.
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We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
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Books are for nothing but to inspire
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Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
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A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.
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We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?
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Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.
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Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange, extravagant and broken the monotony.
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A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.
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We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. (Despite) all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether... The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration.
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