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Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.

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
Cities
Lets
Science
Thinker
Ends
Planet
Great
Planets
Things
City
Men
Safe
Conflagration
Broken
Beware
Risk
Loose

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There is simply the rose it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
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Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them.
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Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.
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Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms.
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A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree.
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If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps.
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In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?
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Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
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Examples are cited by soldiers, of men who have seen the cannon pointed, and the fire given to it, and who have stepped aside from he path of the ball. The terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlour and the cabin.
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Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.
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Life itself is ... a sleep within a sleep.
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There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.
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People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
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In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.
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Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends her all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment.
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The world is nothing, the man is all in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.
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An expense of ends to means is fateMorganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits.
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A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.
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We take care of our health we lay up money we make our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all, -friends?
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