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When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.

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
Class
Society
Faith
Destitution
Disheartened
Unbelief
Betray
Literary
Strange

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I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.
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Let us advance on Chaos and the Dark
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The poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.
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Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.
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Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.
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Books are the best of things if well used if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
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The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.
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In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.
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But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.
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Love should make joy but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.
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The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.
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Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints.
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The multitude of false churches accredits the true religion.
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I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
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When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something he has been put on his wits, on his manhood he has gained facts learns his ignorance is cured of the insanity of conceit has got moderation and real skill.
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Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So muchfate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.
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Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art.
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Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.
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Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never opened there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
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The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
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