Quote

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

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
Destiny
Elements
Bitterest
Intellectual
Brute
Source
Brutes
Belief
Derived
Life
Element
Tragic
Fate

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Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.
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The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy.
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Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!
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In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
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Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
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Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
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Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it.
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Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.
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The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls. Him we flatter, him we feast, compliment, vote for, and will not contradict.
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The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
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There are men too superior to be seen except by a few, as there are notes too high for the scale of most ears.
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Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.
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Happy is the hearing man unhappy the speaking man.
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Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.
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