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He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread

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
Live
Happier
Bread
Dead
Beauty
Dies
Death
Thought

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What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health.
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Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.
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Not gold, but only man can make a people great and strong men who, for truth and honor's sake, stand fast and suffer long.
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There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept or if you have slept or if you have head ache or sciatica or leprosy or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace and not pollute the morning.
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The moral equalizes all enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. Under the whipof the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes.
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My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said that words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption.
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Work and thou canst escape the reward whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.
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What we seek we shall find what we flee from flees from us.
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The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible of the guidance of suitors.
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We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.
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Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.
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What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.
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The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.
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We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies in our line of advance.
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Friendship is an order of nobility from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.
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The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear. It is the storm within which endangers him[,] not the storm without.
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The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.
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Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world.
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It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.
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If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
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