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Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.

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
Good
Fine
Appearance
Would
Called
Charity
Men
Wish
Daily
Expiate
Life
Living
Piece
Expiation
World
Action
Works
Parade
Live
Pay
Parades
Done
Courage
Reliance
Much
Pieces
Apology

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Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.
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Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.
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Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.
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In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also as the green grass.
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A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.
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The lord is the peasant that was, The peasant is the lord that shall be.
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Beauty through my senses stole I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
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An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.
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Men are better than this theology.
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Who gave thee, O Beauty, The keys of this breast,-- Too credulous lover Of blest and unblest? Say, when in lapsed ages Thee knew I of old? Or what was the service For which I was sold?
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Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book.
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There are some men above grief and some men below it.
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There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
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The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not.
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All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us in other words, to engage us to obey.
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Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech.
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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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