Quote

So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head.

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
Human
Except
Humans
Effects
Fanciful
Right
Head
Misplaced
Writing
Growing
Horn
Every
Beauty
Horns
Always
Word
Exquisite
Like
Wrong
Polish
Words
Effect

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Be a gift and a benediction.
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Youth is everywhere in place.
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Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight that they are incredulous of a man's habitual preference of the general good to his own but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration.
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Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares
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People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
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A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
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A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.
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I like people who can do things
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Popularity is for dolls.
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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.
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The city is recruited from the country.
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Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.
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There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome alwayswe are invited to work.
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For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
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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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Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself.
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Society is the stage on which manners are shown novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.
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I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals.
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What we have learned from other becomes our own reflection.
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