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The difference between talent and genius is in the direction of the current: in genius, it is from within outward in talent from without inward.

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
Without
Current
Currents
Direction
Genius
Difference
Talent
Differences
Outward
Within
Inward

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I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil.
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The vanishing, volatile froth of the present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine.
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This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life,never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.
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Human society is made up of partialities. Each citizen has an interest and a view of his own, which, if followed out to the extreme, would leave no room for any other citizen.
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First be a good animal.
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The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.
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A strong person makes the law and custom null before his own will.
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We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man.
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The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought
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In the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life,--do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or your child.
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Tis the good reader that makes the good book in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
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How much of human life is lost in waiting.
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It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.
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The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind.
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A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
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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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Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows.
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The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the heir.
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There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.
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Throw a stone into the stream and the ripples that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.
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