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Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual

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
Time
Impulse
Works
Mankind
Secret
Voice
Individual
Heroism
Great
Contradiction
Good
Obedience

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Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.
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There is a crack in everything God has made
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'Well,' said Red Jacket [to someone complaining that he had not enough time], 'I suppose you have all there is.'
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Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.
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When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work , but the solidest thing we know.
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A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude.
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Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.
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A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.
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The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite.
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Life is too short to waste . . . 'Twill soon be dark Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!
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The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.
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Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.
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The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
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The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart.
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Make youself necessary to someone.
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The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
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What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.
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The hero is suffered to be himself.
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Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.
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The restraining grace of common sense is the mark of all valid minds.
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