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What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

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
Thinking
World
Task
Hardest
Tasks
Think

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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 lie in the lap of immense intelligence.
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No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.
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I am not so foolish as to declaim against forms. Forms are as essential as bodies but to exalt particular forms, to adhere to oneform a moment after it is outgrown, is unreasonable, and it is alien to the spirit of Christ.
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The need for a rational consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
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The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.
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We sometimes meet an original gentleman, who, if manners had not existed, would have invented them.
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Society, to be sure, does not like this very well it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world he declares all to be unfit to be his companions it is very uncivil, nay, insulting Society will retaliate.
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I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
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A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac a talent for debate, disputant skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success.
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God had infinite time to give us.... He cut it up into a near succession of new mornings, and, with each, therefore, a new idea, new inventions, and new applications.
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It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.
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You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.
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Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver.
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The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.
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To eat bread is one thing to love the precepts of Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.
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We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited.
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You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity.
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Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.
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The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.
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