Quote

We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends: and in nature is no end but every thing, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures.

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
Things
Please
Natures
Love
Use
Adapted
Nature
Lifted
Ends
Celestial
Nothing
Infinity
Hard
Climbs
Thing
Superior
Every
Superiors
Ascent

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Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
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There is a property in the horizon which no man has, but he whose eyes can integrate all the parts,--that is, the poet.
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If in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, who would accept the gift of life?
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I can believe a miracle because I can raise my own arm. I can believe a miracle because I can remember. I can believe it because I can speak and be understood by you.
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If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.
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Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle everything else is an intrigue.
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In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.
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Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
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A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
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Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
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Every action has an ancestor of a thought.
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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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It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling.
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Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
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What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?
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Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.
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You cannot institute, without peril of charlatanism.
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To help the young soul, to add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame to redeem defeat by new thought and firm action, this, though not easy, is the work of divine men.
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Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.
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The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.
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