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We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.

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
Come
College
Thing
Rooms
Recitation
Years
Learning
Schooled
Education
Schooling
Lasts
Fifteen
Last
Shut
Words
Schools
School
Ten

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People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
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The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.
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If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as spiritual life, God, soul, cross, etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.
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The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
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Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?
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When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.
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It is the eye which makes the horizon.
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Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.
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And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.
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The greatest genius is the most indebted person.
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If we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last.
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Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.
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It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.
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In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
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Are you not scared by seeing that the gypsies are more attractive to us than the apostles?
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Imitation cannot go above its model.
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Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world.
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All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.
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No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.
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To clothe the fiery thought In simple words succeeds, For still the craft of genius is To mask a king in weeds.
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