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Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight that they are incredulous of a man's habitual preference of the general good to his own but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration.

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
Life
Sacrifice
Sacrifices
General
Preference
Wealth
Proved
Almost
Admiration
Self
Limit
Good
Ease
Incredulous
Men
Weight
Habitual
Love
Limits
Rank

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How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.
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Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual
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A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascinationfor all educated Americans.
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He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Love, and you shall be loved.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth it is the beginning of wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.
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But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful and lovely, is degrading and futile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The end of being is to know and if you say, the end of knowledge is action,-why, yes, but the end of that action again, is knowledge.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One's enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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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Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
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It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.
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Happy is the house that shelters a friend.
Ralph Waldo Emerson