Quote

A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds.

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
Makes
Sun
Feeble
Ideas
Built
Breeds
Men
Imagination
Estates
Possible
Farms
Eye
Houses
Hope
Sees
Strong
Clouds
Tilled
House
Fast
Fenced

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And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.
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The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy.
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The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.
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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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Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.
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It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.
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Surely nobody would be a charlatan, who could afford to be sincere.
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The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every bystander to take his part.
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All diseases run into one, old age.
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The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.
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Why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy and every man is grave alone.
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The Times are the masquerade of the eternities trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.
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He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.
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Life has a way of demanding that you live it.
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Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints.
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A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment and even obstacles and opposition will but make us like the fabled specter-ships, which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind.
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All the great ages have been ages of belief.
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Do not believe that possibly you can escape the reward of your action.
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Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky. ... These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.
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