Quote

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

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
Break
Words
Impoverish
Cannot
Chop
Truth
Finite
Mind
Organs
Dimensions
Cover
Infinite

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These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.
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There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.
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Deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing.
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The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are, --/ Never read a book that is not a year old./ Never read any but the famed books./ Never read any but what you like.
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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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How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.
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Slavery it is that makes slavery freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.
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When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something he has been put on his wits, on his manhood he has gained facts learns his ignorance is cured of the insanity of conceit has got moderation and real skill.
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Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
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Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.
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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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That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say even though we may repeat the words ever so often.
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Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.
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As long as civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
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If a man's eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.
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Books are the best of things if well used if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
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A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover rooted stays.
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Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.
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We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.
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