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In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

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
Find
Wide
Great
Critical
Would
Almost
Custom
Lying
Gross
Society
Spontaneous
Sense
Customs
Action
Analysis
Around
Actions

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Artists must be sacrificed to their art.
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There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.
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We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.
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Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.
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All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
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The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.
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In daily life what distinguishes the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well.
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Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.
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Meet your failure nobly, and it will not differ from success.
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When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are.
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The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we callFate.
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There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.
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Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.
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It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make asally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration.
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Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never opened there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
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I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.
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A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.
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