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But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful and lovely, is degrading and futile.

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
Compassion
Cannot
Futile
Degrading
Useful
Lovely

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What you do thunders above your head so loudly, I cannot hear the words you speak.
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Every really able man, in whatever direction he works - a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter - if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator?
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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.
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The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought
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We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man.
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The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them.
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Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.
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Commonsense is the wick of the candle.
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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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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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The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.
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The disease with which the human mind now labors is want of faith
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Every individual strives to grow and exclude, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature.
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