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That man is idle who can do something better.

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
Idleness
Laziness
Idle
Better
Something
Men

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Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character.
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All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
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I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
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What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.
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The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health he must be at the top of his condition.
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I am old, yet I look at wise men and see that I am very young. I look over those stars yonder, and into the myriads of the aspirant and ordered souls, and see I am a stranger and a youth and have yet my spurs to win. Too ridiculous are these airs of age.
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Quotation confesses inferiority.
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He only is rich who owns the day.
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Truth is beautiful within and without, forevermore.
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We judge of man's wisdom by his hope.
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Don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.
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We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
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This very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
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Nature is saturated with Deity.
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There is nothing in history to parallel the influence of Jesus Christ.
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How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself when he loses himself in the crowd when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.
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The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.
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I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each ofthese works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken that act or step is the spiritual act all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.
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I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.
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I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange ofgood offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.
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