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Commonsense is the wick of the candle.

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
Wick
Commonsense
Candle
Inspirational

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A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
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The river knows the way to the sea: Without a pilot it runs and falls, Blessing all lands with its charity.
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Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
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You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.
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We judge of man's wisdom by his hope.
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The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.
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All that can be done for you is nothing to what you can do for yourself.
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Skepticism is slow suicide.
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The lover of letters loves power too.
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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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I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife.
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A man becomes what he thinks about most of the time
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In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes.
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The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.
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What we seek we shall find what we flee from flees from us.
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Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
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The Soul rules over matter. Matter may pass away like a mote in the sunbeam, may be absorbed into the immensity of God, as a mistis absorbed into the heat of the Sun--but the soul is the kingdom of God, the abode of love, of truth, of virtue.
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Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and...it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path.... He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.
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The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.
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Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at whatis inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.
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