Quote

Intellect is a fire rash and pitiless it melts this wonderful bone-house which is called man. Genius even, as it is the greatestgood, is the greatest harm.

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
Genius
Greatest
Pitiless
Fire
Melts
Wonderful
Rash
Called
Bone
House
Bones
Even
Intellect
Men
Harm

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Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.
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The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
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The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.
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Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.
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Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
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The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.
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A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
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What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.
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The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.
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The highest proof of civility is that the whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the greatest number.
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Good criticism is very rare and always precious.
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The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible.
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No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment.
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The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.
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What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy only the precursor of the reason.
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Stand guard at the portal of your mind.
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Yet America is a poem in our eyes its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
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We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
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People who know how to act are never preachers.
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For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
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