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

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The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.
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A good indignation makes an excellent speech.
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Humility is the secret of the wise.
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The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy.
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But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.
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Nature ever faithful is To such as trust her faithfulness.
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The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.
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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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Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.
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Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
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It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude that all beauty and power which men covet are somehow born out of that Alpine district that any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.
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Blessed are those who have no talent!
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And in cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation.
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We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and... Nature, the sun and moon, the animals, the water and stones, which should be their toys.
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The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
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Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so.
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Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.
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Everything intercepts us from ourselves.
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It is commonly observed that a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and with the rapid wealth come rapid claims which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly dissipated.
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The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls. Him we flatter, him we feast, compliment, vote for, and will not contradict.
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