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For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.

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
Every
Grain
Wit
Folly

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The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.
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I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.
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The music that can deepest reach and cure all ill is cordial speech.
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Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where aour spoons are gone) and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.
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The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
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The charm of fine manners is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of these arts.
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We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
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We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.
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Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.
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The secret of drunkenness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.
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All diseases run into one, old age.
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In the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life,--do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or your child.
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Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,--a long way leading nowhere.
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Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.
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Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends her all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment.
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Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself.
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But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world.
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We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.
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People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.
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Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world.
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