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Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.

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
Past
Corrupts
Snakes
Turns
Whatever
History

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Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
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Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
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A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.
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Europe has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true.
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Language is the archives of history.
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Treat your friend as a spectacle.
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Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.
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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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Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
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What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.
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Religion must always be a crab fruit it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty.
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Where is he who seeing a thousand men useless and unhappy, and making the whole region forlorn by their inaction, and conscious himself of possessing the faculty they want, does not hear his call to go and be their king?
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No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them.
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True friends are two people who are comfortable sharing silence together.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.
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I covet truth beauty is unripe childhood's cheat I leave it behind with the games of youth.
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The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
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Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
Ralph Waldo Emerson