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

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I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity.
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Pride is handsome, economical pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride.
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By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
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History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.
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But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.
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The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.
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Invention breeds invention.
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Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.
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Many times the reading of a book has made the future of a man.
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The Yankee is one who, if he once gets his teeth set on a thing, all creation can't make him let go.
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Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.
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The primary wisdom is intuition.
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In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
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The disease with which the human mind now labors is want of faith
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We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.
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The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.
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Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.
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In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.
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