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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.

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
Evil
Enemies
Culture
Instruments
Form
Forms
Power
Material
Impediments
Come
Materials
Convert
Nothing
Wants
Spare
Men
Enemy
Spares
Time
Known
Organized

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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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Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life.
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I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies and iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, and writing and come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than we when [he] threatens his whole threat I will not love you.
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What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.
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If I am the devil's child, I will live then, by the devil.
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The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.
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The sermon which I write inquisitive of truth is good a year after, but that which is written because a sermon must be writ is musty the next day.
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The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect... it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labour of a wise and spiritual nation.
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The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist meeting-house.
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All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.
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Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness.
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Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct that every honour is desert that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand.
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Pictures must not be too picturesque.
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Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.
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Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go, and is only right admirable when to all its beauty and speed a subserviency to the will, like that of walking, is added.
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We flee away from cities, but we bring The best of cities, these learned classifiers, Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.
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