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The intellectual man requires a fine bait the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

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
March
Badge
Requires
Pageant
Easily
Badges
Intellectual
Bait
Fine
Frenzy
Everybody
Banner
Hours
Amused
Drugged
Music
Amusement
Marches

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The democrat is a young conservative the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.
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Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread and meat.
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Where the banana grows man is sensual and cruel.
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Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
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And in cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation.
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What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.
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Let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.
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Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors.
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Every man who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.
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It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.
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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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The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.
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[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.
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The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tablets yet unbroken: The word by seers or sibyls told, In groves of oak or fanes of gold, Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind.
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The lover is made happier by his love than the object of his affection.
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How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself when he loses himself in the crowd when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.
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I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
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Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.
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A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat self control is the rule. Anger is an uncontrollable feeling that betrays what you are when you are not yourself. Anger is that powerful internal force that blows out the light of reason. Know this to be the enemy: it is anger, born of desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson