Quote

When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.

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
Voice
Roaring
Hands
Nationalism
Whole
Patriot
Heart
Patriotism
Explore
Cleanness
Purity
Fain
Nation
Unpatriotic
Nations
Scoundrels

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The language of the street is always strong.
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Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
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The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.
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Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet.
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If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.
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But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends.
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The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.
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The virtue you would like to have, assume it is already yours, appropriate it, enter into the part and live the character just as the great actor is absorbed in... the part he plays.
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The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear. It is the storm within which endangers him[,] not the storm without.
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Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.
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Life is a search after power and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,-there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,-that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.
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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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The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.
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I think no virtue goes with size.
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Henceforth, please God, forever I forego the yolk of men's opinions. I will be light-hearted as a bird and live with God. I find him in the bottom of my heart, and I hear continually his voice therein.
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The only way to have a friend is to be one.
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Live in the fields, and God will give you lectures on natural philosophy every day.
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The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once.
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A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must but coop up most men and you undo them.
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