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What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?

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
City
Cities
Men
Incongruous
Aggregate
Obeyed
Materials

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Art is a jealous mistress and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
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The order of things consents to virtue.
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All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.
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Genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.
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The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.
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The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible archetype.
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Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.
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As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods.
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A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.
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A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.
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The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed.
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He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
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I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.
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He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.
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Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too.
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The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. He only is right who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded by worry, fret and anxiety. Finish every day, and be done with it. You have done what you could.
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Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
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We ascribe beauty to that which is simple which has no superfluous parts which exactly answers its end which stands related to all things which is the mean of many extremes.
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Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature in darkness and light in heat and cold in the ebb and flow of water in male and female in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body in the systole an
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