Quote

I think all men know better than they do know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles but they darenot trust their presentiments.

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
Commend
Carts
Institutions
Trust
Better
Men
Think
Thinking
Baubles

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For all symbols are fluxional all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.
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I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults overthe moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.
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He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser.
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In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
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War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.
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The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.
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When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other you shall not see the face of man you shall not hear any name the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience.
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The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.
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Every man has a vocation. The talent is the call.
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Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.
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The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.
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There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.
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A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me 'that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.
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Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.
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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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Your work should be in praise of what you love.
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What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?
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We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. (Despite) all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether... The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration.
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The value of a dollar is to buy just things a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth more than a dollar in a jail in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in constant play.
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Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
Ralph Waldo Emerson