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What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to 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
Form
Value
Wastes
Thought
Effort
Attempts
Time
Education
Select
Call
Receiving
Sure
Belongs
Balk
Values
Precious
Thwart
Natural
Guess
Comparative
Often
Waste
Magnetism

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He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.
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Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.
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There is always safety in valor.
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Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.
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Ah Fate, cannot a man Be wise without a beard? East, West, from Beer to Dan, Say, was it never heard That wisdom might in youth be gotten, Or wit be ripe before 't was rotten?
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The pleasure of eloquence is in greatest part owing often to the stimulus of the occasion which produces it- - to the magic of sympathy, which exalts the feeling of each by radiating on him the feeling of all.
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A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.
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A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so largely on his forces as tolame him a defect pays him revenues on the other side.
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Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.
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There are days when the great are near us, when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought.
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In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.
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Women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour.
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Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.
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For you, o broker, there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys.
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A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
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Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
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Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.
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Oh, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!
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We must be courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.
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Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson