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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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Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself.
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The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
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Astronomy is a cold, desert science, with all its pompous figures,-depends a little too much on the glass-grinder, too little on the mind. 'T is of no use to show us more planets and systems. We know already what matter is, and more or less of it does not signify.
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The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.
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Read proudly--put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it? I am quite ready to be charmed, but I shall not make-believe I am charmed.
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Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.
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To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
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If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous- looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap, dear house.
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If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.
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Throughout the ages there have always been those who have been willing to go beyond the norms and reach for that unknown and distant star.
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I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.
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What you do thunders above your head so loudly, I cannot hear the words you speak.
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Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. What possesses interest for us is thenatural of each, his constitutional excellence. This is forever a surprise, engaging and lovely we cannot be satiated with knowing it, and about it and it is this which the conversation with Nature cherishes and guards.
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Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.
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I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste.
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We do not yet trust the unknown power of thoughts.
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It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.
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Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.
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The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web.
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