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If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.

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
Honesty
Mind
Minds
Would
Uppermost
Men
General
Peculiar
Interesting
Manner
Language
Hide
Individual
Avoid
Truth
Strive
Every

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The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.
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The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment.
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A divine person is the prophecy of the mind a friend is the hope of the heart.
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Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.
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One single idea may have greater weight than all the men, animals, and machines for a century.
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What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.
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All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.
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The eye is easily frightened.
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Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there.
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Nature, as we know her, is no saint.... She comes eating and drinking and sinning.
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Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
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Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.
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Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.
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It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern.
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Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men.
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I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil.
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You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
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Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.
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An actually existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel.
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