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A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.

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
Learned
Learning
Use
Awkwardness
Become
Borrowed
Certain
Marks
Mark
Soon
Thoughts

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Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book.
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Great men are sincere.
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The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
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We do what we can, and then make a theory to prove our performance the best.
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We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.
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An empire is an immense egotism.
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Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? 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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Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and...it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path.... He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.
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Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.
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Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.
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I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.
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Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.
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So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.
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The disease with which the human mind now labors is want of faith
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Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.
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Do not spill thy soul in running hither and yon, grieving over the mistakes and the vices of others. The one person whom it is most necessary to reform is yourself.
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And dazzling memory revive.Refresh the faded tints, Recut the aged prints, And write my old adventures, with the pen Which, on the first day, drew Upon the tablets blue The dancing Pleiads, and the eternal men.
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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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The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and men unconsciously seek for it in each other.
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You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson