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People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

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
Urges
Content
Intellectual
Knowing
Life
People
Disparage
Urge

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In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.
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The soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted.
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Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.
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You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.
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The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
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There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the characterwhich draws them.
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Teach me your mood, O patient stars. Who climb each night, the ancient sky. leaving on space no shade, no scars, no trace of age, no fear to die.
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If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man.
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Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.
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Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.
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He is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor and how to give access to themasterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization.
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A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.
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Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
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The great will not condescend to take anything seriously.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.
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What is the end of human life? It is not, believe me, the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make a fortune, but it is, in few words, that he should explore himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such success that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.
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Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature.
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One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.
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