Quote

We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.

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
Cannot
Ambition
Renovate
Women
Wants
Natures
States
Shall
Lean
Men
State
Satisfy
Life
Force
Continually
Social
Practicals
Night
Practical
Nature
Proportion

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I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.
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The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.
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Wherever a man commits a crime, God finds a witness. Every secret crime has its reporter.
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Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
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Look sharply after your own thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear and you shall never find that perception again never, I say-but perhaps years, ages, and I know not what events and worlds my lie between you and its return.
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If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
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Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee, from the hill-top looking down And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm The sexton tolling the bell at noon, Dreams not that great Napoleon Sto
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Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.
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A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is.
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Fear God, and where you go men shall think they walk in hallowed cathedrals.
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In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.
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Deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing.
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He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread
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The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.
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Go, speed the stars of Thought On to their shining goals - The sower scatters broad his seed, The wheat thou strew'st be souls.
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There is a property in the horizon which no man has, but he whose eyes can integrate all the parts,--that is, the poet.
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The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.
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Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct that every honour is desert that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand.
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We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man.
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