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

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Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance.
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Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.
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A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.
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Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.
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There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
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There is a crack in everything God has made
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It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.
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The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.
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Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.
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Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
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The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning.
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A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.
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Every man is grave alone.
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To help the young soul, to add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame to redeem defeat by new thought and firm action, this, though not easy, is the work of divine men.
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Everything intercepts us from ourselves.
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I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?--or, prior to that, answer me this, Are you victimizable?
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Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it.
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Knowledge exists to be imparted.
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