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Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.

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
Always
Nation
Dramatic
Influence
Witness
Enemy
Bear
Literature
English
Nations
Bears
Two
Poet
Every
Hundred
Sufficiently
Years
Genius
Poets

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History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.
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The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.
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Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?
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Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
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Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous or when they are most luxurious-they are conservatives after dinner.
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The last change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air.
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Wise cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower of civilization, and the best result which life has to offer us,--a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play, and as the reproduction in finer form, of all our havings.
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It is an esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle as if conscience were not good for hands and legs.
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It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.
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Dear to us are those who love us... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
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And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.
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The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
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All necessary truth is its own evidence.
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What we call results are beginnings.
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The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the intellect.
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People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
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Language is the archives of history.
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But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world.
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The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
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The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth.
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