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The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed.

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
Seeds
Democrat
Gone
Aristocrat
Aristocracy
Ripe
Seed

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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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All is a riddle, and the key to a riddle...is another riddle.
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What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.
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Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.
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Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.
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As soon as a child has left the room his strewn toys become affecting.
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Not in his goals but in his transitions, man is great.
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Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.
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Belief and love,--a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the centre of nature, and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe.
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No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.
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A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams.
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Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.
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People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little.
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The laws of light and of heat translate each other-so do the laws of sound and colour and so galvanism, electricity and magnetism are varied forms of this selfsame energy.
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Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?
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Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.
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One can never truly savor success until first tasting adversity.
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A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step downward, is a step upward. The man who renounceshimself, comes to himself.
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In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.
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Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.
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