Quote

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.

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
Change
Wheels
Men
Ships
Like
Spring
Built
Tossed
Stand
Permanence
Knowledge
Springs
House
Hypothesis
Nature
Ship

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Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts.
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It is not length of life, but depth of life.
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The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
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I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.
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When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,--when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?
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I see my trees repair their boughs.
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The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.
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The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would be criminal which told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached.
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To live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom.
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Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
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We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
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He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation but he shuts the door of truth.
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Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
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Life loiters at the book's first page,-- Ah! could we turn the leaf.
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A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants.
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The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory.
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I quote another man's saying unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.
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Great men are sincere.
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Every individual strives to grow and exclude, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature.
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The virtue you would like to have, assume it is already yours, appropriate it, enter into the part and live the character just as the great actor is absorbed in... the part he plays.
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