Quote

When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,--when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

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
Years
Fire
Souls
Latitude
Time
Running
Perception
Hue
Two
Degrees
Egyptian
Thought
Mines
Fires
Truth
Mine
Fired
Soul
Meet
Plato
Feel
Influence
Count
Feels
Becomes
Measure
Tinged

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Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,--familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination knows practically Marshal Saxe's rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.
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We are ashamed of our thoughts and often see them brought forth by others.
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The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
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The attraction and superiority of California are in its days. It has better days & more of them, than any other country.
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Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.
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Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.
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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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Immitation is suicide.
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If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways, I keep and pass and turn again.
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The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically.
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Tis the privilege of Art Thus to play its cheerful part, Man on earth to acclimate And bend the exile to his fate.
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Excite the soul, and the weather and the town and your condition in the world all disappear the world itself loses its solidity, nothing remains but the soul and the Divine Presence in which it lives.
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Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?
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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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It is one of the biggest blessing that you can be stupid with your true friends and behave like you shame to do elsewhere
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Who gave thee, O Beauty, The keys of this breast,-- Too credulous lover Of blest and unblest? Say, when in lapsed ages Thee knew I of old? Or what was the service For which I was sold?
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If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.
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In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.
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Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.
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Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson