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The student is to read history actively and not passively to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles as never to those who do not respect themselves.

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
Books
Muse
Read
Compelled
History
Text
Book
Student
Passively
Never
Esteem
Oracles
Life
Thus
Commentary
Students
Actively
Respect
Utter

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Economy does not consist in saving the coal, but in using the time while it burns.
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All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.
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All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view.
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Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun.
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The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.
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Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,-must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.
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America is a country of young men.
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The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure.
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And in cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation.
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All mankind love a lover.
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I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
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What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.
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Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, so hot? my little Sir.
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Man is the will, and woman the sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment the sail when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail.
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All men are poets at heart.
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Divine persons are character born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory organized.
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Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature.
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Body cannot teach wisdom God only.
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Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints.
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