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The unbelief of the age is attested by the loud condemnation of trifles.

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
Unbelief
Condemnation
Trifles
Loud
Age
Attested
Agnosticism

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Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
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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.
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Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age,—lasting as space and time,—embosomed in time and space.
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Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of winds, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element.
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What torments of grief you endured, from evils that never arrived
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This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life,never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.
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Any work looks wonderful to me except the one which I can do.
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In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.
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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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In the hands of the discoverer, medicine becomes a heroic art . . wherever life is dear he is a demigod.
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A man of no conversation should smoke.
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What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?
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Every man is a channel through which heaven floweth.
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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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There is properly no history, only biography.
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Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature.
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Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.
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Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.
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But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.
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I have heard that death takes us away from ill things, not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man we pronounce the belief of immortality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson