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You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God you shall not have both.

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
Joy
Shall
Power

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One of our statesmen said, The curse of this country is eloquent men.
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The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.
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Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might.
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The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
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Dear to us are those who love us... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
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If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it.
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Be an opener of doors
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Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?
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He that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves
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Beauty brings its own fancy price, for all that a man hath will he give for his love.
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To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.
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In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes.
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We never touch but at points.
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The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.
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What a new face courage puts on everything!
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All things are moral and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
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Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
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The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.
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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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson