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A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

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
Children
Child
Greater
Foregoing
Hours
Janus
Friends
Harbinger
Future
Faced
Past
Prophet
Come
Friendship
Looks
Friend

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The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.
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All the great ages have been ages of belief.
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Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.
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The highest end of government is the culture of men.
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When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.
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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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People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
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There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome alwayswe are invited to work.
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Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
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Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so.
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Of Nature itself upon the soul the sunrise, the haze of autumn, the winter starlight seem interlocutors the prevailing sense is that of an exposition in poetry a high discourse, the voice of the speaker seems to breathe as much from the landscape as from his own breast it is Nature communing with the seer.
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Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician.
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Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.
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We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones.
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The populace drags down the gods to their own level.
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To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
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Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.
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Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.
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There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.
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Great is the art, Great be the manners, of the bard. He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number But, leaving rule and pale forethought, He shall aye climb For his rhyme. Pass in, pass in, the angels say
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