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We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

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
Sea
Plains
Mountain
Earthquake
Morning
Geology
Learn
Ghastly
Earthquakes
Dry
Mountains
Cloven
Bed
Diagrams

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Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.
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Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain. The mind does not create what it perceives, anymore than the eye creates the rose.
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I will not live out of me I will not see with others' eyes My good is good, my evil ill I would be free.
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All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.
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Great is the art, Great be the manners, of the bard. He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number But, leaving rule and pale forethought, He shall aye climb For his rhyme. Pass in, pass in, the angels say
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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.
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Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.
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The highest proof of civility is that the whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the greatest number.
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Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts.
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The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious from thesleep of passions to their rage.
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We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies in our line of advance.
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A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.
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If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
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Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it.
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Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.
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Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.
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Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
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Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
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Body cannot teach wisdom God only.
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What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.
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