Quote

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, forthat is a way of receiving it from ourselves but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living it.

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
Love
Living
Forgive
Bitten
Hate
Meat
Bestow
Hands
Receive
Assumes
Seems
Assuming
Degrading
Anything
Forgiving
Feeds
Sometimes
Danger
Giver
Something
Quite
Dependence
Way
Hand
Receiving

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You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of histuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.
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Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
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There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.
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Religion must always be a crab fruit it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty.
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The Oversoul is before Time, and Time, Father of all else, is one of his children.
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The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible.
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For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.
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What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
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We take care of our health we lay up money we make our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all, -friends?
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The man for whom the law exists - the man of forms, the conservative - is a tame man.
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The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.
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What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations.
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The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.
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In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.
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After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.
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The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?
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To accomplish excellence or anything outstanding, you must listen to that whisper which is heard by you alone.
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