Quote

Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

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
Cannot
Feigned
Stills
Iliad
Still
Abolished
May
Pretension
Back
Authenticity
Real
Slavery
Never
Wrote
World
Greatness

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The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tablets yet unbroken: The word by seers or sibyls told, In groves of oak or fanes of gold, Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind.
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Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.
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Go, speed the stars of Thought On to their shining goals - The sower scatters broad his seed, The wheat thou strew'st be souls.
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He is great who confers the most benefits.
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Language is the archives of history.
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I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.
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The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.
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Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use...In God, every end is converted into a new means.
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Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature.
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A little praise goes a great ways.
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Hidden away in the inner nature of the real man is the law of his life, and someday he will discover it and consciously make use of it. He will heal himself, make himself happy and prosperous, and life in an entirely different world. For he will have discovered that life is from within and not from without.
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Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.
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Poetry being ... when we look from the center outward.
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All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.
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Live well, learn plenty, laugh often, love much.
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The days come and go but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
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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.
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Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
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When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.
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Nature is a frugal mother, and never gives without measure. When she has work to do, she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped.
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