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We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.

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
Drop
Turn
Blood
Turns
Sires
Many
Genealogy
Children
Betrays
Every
Ancestor
Betray

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Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not Devil's wine, but God's wine.
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The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
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It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.
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Adult males are what their moms designed them.
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The gentleman is a man of truth.
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The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.
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For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.
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Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defenders, whether Luther, or William Penn, or St. Paul.
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Two touch the string, The harp is dumb.
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The dice of God are always loaded.
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Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.
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If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false statement I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? The streetis as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie.
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No man can have society upon his own terms.
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As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.
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The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.
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All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.
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Ah, if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches.
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It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men in their religion in their education in their pursuits their modes of living their association in their property in their speculative views.
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Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
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Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.
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