Quote

He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.

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
Ends
Mixtures
Power
Determination
Wells
Destroy
Well
Train
Nothing
Pure
Impediment
Made
Leave
Impediments
Good
Culture
Forbid
Men
Away
Mixture

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Tis the good reader that makes the good book a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
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Meek young men grow up in libraries.
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The population of the world is a conditional population these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live there shall be a better, please God.
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These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.
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I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
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There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.
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When a man becomes cultivated, he develops a new respect for who he is. This causes him to be ashamed of his past identification of himself and others according to things, i.e. property.
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Every stoic was a stoic but in Christendom where is the Christian?
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There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.
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Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.
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'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.
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Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.
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The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health he must be at the top of his condition.
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The house praises the carpenter.
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The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination, is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts.
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The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.
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Pride ruined the angels, Their shame them restores And the joy that is sweetest Lurks in stings of remorse.
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The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.
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The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.
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Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use.
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