Quote

Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle ofyour character and aims.

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
Work
Obedient
Aim
Foolish
Whenever
Instead
Formality
Character
Converting
Take
Meanness
Thing
Aims

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Adult males are what their moms designed them.
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It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.
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If you don't ride in the rain, you don't ride.
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The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses.
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The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.
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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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Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?
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A man of no conversation should smoke.
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The unbelief of the age is attested by the loud condemnation of trifles.
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Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.
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Duty grows everywhere--like children, like grass.
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Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.
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I didn't find my friends the good Lord gave them to me.
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An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese.
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Our life seems not present, so much as prospective not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast- flowingvigor.
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Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
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Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.
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There is no man of Nature's worth In the circle of the earth.
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Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
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There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.
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