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Let there be worse cotton and better men.

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
Cotton
Worse
Peace
Better

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Knowledge is the only elegance.
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There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.
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For flowers that bloom about our feet For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet For song of bird, and hum of bee For all things fair we hear or see, Father in heaven, we thank Thee!
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In a world of infinite choice people are struggling to figure out what to do.
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A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us.
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Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.
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But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.
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The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.
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By going one step further back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still higher vision.
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The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish.
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It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man's work but came by wide social labor, whena thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.
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To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy is to set your own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.
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The people are to be taken in very small doses.
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I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.
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Tis the good reader that makes the good book in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
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How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.
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Let a man behave in his own house as a guest.
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The goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subservessuch as we see in the sexual attraction.
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I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
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In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.
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