Quote

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

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
Except
Food
Cannot
Reason
Respectable
Everything
Belly
Must
Perpetual
Make
Feed
Deny

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Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.
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I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
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The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.
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Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age,—lasting as space and time,—embosomed in time and space.
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I like man, but not men.
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The highest Beauty should be plain set.
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I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-borne treasures home.
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Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.
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An eminent teacher of girls said, the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe.
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The man (or woman) who can make hard things easy is the educator.
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One can never truly savor success until first tasting adversity.
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Tis the good reader that makes the good book in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
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The gates of thought, - how slow and late they discover themselves! Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open.
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A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
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The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.
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The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.
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Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance.
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Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
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