Quote

It is bad enough that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society who has fine traits.He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a cripple.

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
Anything
Fit
Cripple
Come
Integrity
Cripples
Without
Distance
Geniuses
Enough
Worse
Appearing
Men
Genius
Admired
Fine
Traits
Society
Near
Cannot
Useful

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A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.
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The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.
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Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
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It is not the irregular hours or irregular diet that makes the romantic life.
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In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.
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No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.
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The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.
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And striving to be Man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.
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I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer, or suffer. I renounce the whole tribe of fero. I embrace absolute life.
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The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun and after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow ever the grass grows.
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I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.
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Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
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I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.
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There is a principle which is the basis of things, which all speech aims to say, and all action to evolve, a simple, quiet, undescribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in us, our rightful lord: we are not to do, but to let do not to work, but to be worked upon.
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The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.
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Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
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Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.
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A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.
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Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.
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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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