Quote

Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.

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
Good
Greatness
Estate
Comer
Men
Travel
Brushes
Limestone
Like
Poverty
Estates
Pasture
Instead
Encounter
Geologist
Feeling
Passes
Pastures
Feelings
Encounters
Slate
Shows
Treat
Travelling
Great
Treats
Brush

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An expense of ends to means is fateMorganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits.
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There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us?
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Knowledge is when you learn something new every day. Wisdom is when you let something go every day.
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Love is like wildflowers It's often found in the most unlikely places.
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The two terrors that discourage creativity and creative living are fear of public opinion and undue reverence for one's own consistency.
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Science, Nature,-O, I've yearned to open some page.
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The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.
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Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.
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We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.
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It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him [H.D. Thoreau]. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.
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A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
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Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
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There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.
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It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.
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Cities of mortals woe-begone Fantastic care derides, But in the serious landscape lone Stern benefit abides.
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The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every bystander to take his part.
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[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.
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Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know
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The life of man is a self-evolving circle.
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Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.
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