Quote

The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves the man is lost.

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
Lost
Dog
Fits
Part
Trade
Tends
Wells
Careers
Falls
Well
Turns
Moves
Work
Common
Machine
Men
Moving
Details
Fall
Machines
Customary
Experience
Fit
Spit

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If you act, you show character if you sit still, you show it if you sleep you show it.
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Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities?
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The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.
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Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?
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Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.
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Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
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Are you not scared by seeing that the gypsies are more attractive to us than the apostles?
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I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, - the Genius and creative Principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.
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Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
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Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.
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The teaching of politics is that the Government, which was set for protection and comfort of all good citizens, becomes the principal obstruction and nuisance with which we have to contend... The cheat and bully and malefactor we meet everywhere is the Government.
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All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effiminated by position of nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.
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The music that can deepest reach and cure all ill is cordial speech.
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The only reward of virtue is virtue.
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The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.
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I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
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The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.
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Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.
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Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.
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