Quote

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.

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
Gives
Sympathetic
Persons
Finger
Person
Placed
Giving
Sympathy
Much
Catch
Swimmer
Men
Legs
Drown
Fingers
Dilemma
Among
Drowning

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What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.
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Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.
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Dear to us are those who love us... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
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A walk in the woods is only an exalted dream.
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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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Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there.
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The city is recruited from the country.
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The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.
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But there is no end to the praise of books, to the value of the library. Who shall estimate their influence on our population where all the millions read and write ? It is the joy of nations that man can communicate all his thoughts, discoveries and virtues to records that may last for centuries.
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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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Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.
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Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere.
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A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us.
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It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.
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Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply,- 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die.
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There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept or if you have slept or if you have head ache or sciatica or leprosy or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace and not pollute the morning.
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