Quote

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

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Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!-it seems to say,-there is victory yet for all justice and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
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The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe.
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A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.
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There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron show,--the rootsof all things are in man.
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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.
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Let us leave hurry to slaves.
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Power ceases in the instant of repose it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.
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We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends: and in nature is no end but every thing, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures.
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The laws of light and of heat translate each other-so do the laws of sound and colour and so galvanism, electricity and magnetism are varied forms of this selfsame energy.
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Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt 'tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much.
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Love, and you shall be loved.
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Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.
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If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways, I keep and pass and turn again.
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We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.
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We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?
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The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.
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A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
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Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.
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Thought is the seed of action but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.
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Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusades a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
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