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All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

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
Improves
Improvement
Society
Men
Plume

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Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory.
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The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
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In the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.
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When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.
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Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,--a long way leading nowhere.
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Ah Fate, cannot a man Be wise without a beard? East, West, from Beer to Dan, Say, was it never heard That wisdom might in youth be gotten, Or wit be ripe before 't was rotten?
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That which builds is better than that which is built.
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The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
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We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
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What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy only the precursor of the reason.
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The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.
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What school, college, or lecture bring men depends on what men bring to carry it home in.
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Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.
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The soul is the perceiver and the revealer of truth.
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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 power of a man increases steadily by continuing in one direction.
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There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.
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Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares
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Speak the affirmative emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject.
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Thought is the seed of action.
Ralph Waldo Emerson