Quote

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

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
Men
Wealth
Lest
Commonplaces
Love
Leave
Undone
Rekindle
People
Rich
Commonplace
Denouncing
Word
Thirst
Moralists
Power
Rush
Moralist
Take
Presses
Aiming
Many
Press
Pulpit
Would
Civilization
Hazards

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Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
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Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It is so well, that it is sure that it will be well. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power.
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Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed.
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God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.
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Thy dangerous glances make women of men new-born, we are melting into nature again.
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Each age, it is found, must write its own books or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
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Isolation must precede true society.
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Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.
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Let a man then know his worth and keep things under his feet.
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Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.
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But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.
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No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.
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When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.
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The Bhagavad-Gita is an empire of thought and in its philosophical teachings Krishna has all the attributes of the full-fledged montheistic deity and at the same time the attributes of the Upanisadic absolute.
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Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
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The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.
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Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words.
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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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There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.
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All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.... Build, therefore, your own world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson