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Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

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
Wish
Indefinite
Desire
Sigh
Tell
Wishes
Cannot
Vast
Stills
Expect
Still
Thoughts
Struggle
Wise

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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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There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order.
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For splendor, there must somewhere be rigid economy. That the head of the house may go brave, the members must be plainly clad, and the town must save that the State may spend.
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Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player.
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The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.
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Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.
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This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life,never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.
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Great conversation ... requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
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Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver.
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Men are what their mothers made them.
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Be yourself no base imitator of another, but your best self.
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Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
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A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac a talent for debate, disputant skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success.
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He that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves
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To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven depending on whether they compare it to something better and so feel disappointed and bitter or something worse and so feel relieved and grateful.
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Meek young men grow up in libraries.
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But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.
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Discontent is want of self-reliance it is infirmity of will.
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Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
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Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.
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