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This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life depends upon one's actions.

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
Great
Actions
Life
Depends
Full
Quality
Whatever
Upon
Temporal
Action
Encounters
Body
Faults

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If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.
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We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.
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We change whether we like it or not.
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Nature encourages no looseness pardons no errors.
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[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.
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Among the map makers of each generation are the risk takers, those who see the opportunities, seize the moment and expand man's vision of the future
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Astrology is astronomy brought down to Earth and applied toward the affairs of men.
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A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.
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We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.
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The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.
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Be a football to Time and Chance, the more kicks, the better, so that you inspect the whole game and know its utmost law.
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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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There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries.
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A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.
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Successful is the person who has lived well, laughed often and loved much, who has gained the respect of children, who leaves the world better than they found it, who has never lacked appreciation for the earth's beauty, who never fails to look for the best in others or give the best of themselves.
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The charm of fine manners is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of these arts.
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Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.
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But harder still it has proved to resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel, and Bobinson, and their parliaments, and their whole generation, adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief that they were enriching the country which they were impoverishing.
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He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
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A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.
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