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No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.

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
Men
Rarely
Step
Steps
Seeing
Knowing
Sloth
Taken
Laziness
Matter
Idle
Much
Faculty

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Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
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The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth.
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I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
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The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and, in the dark, brings them friends from far.
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The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.
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A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
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Talent may frolic and juggle genius realizes and adds.
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It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no person can sincerely try to help another without helping him or herself. Serve and you shall be served. If you love and serve people, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration.
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Pictures must not be too picturesque.
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I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
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The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.
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Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
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Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
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Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.
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The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.
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No institution will be better than the institutor.
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It is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.
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Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.
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