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The history of reform is always identical it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.

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
Always
Daily
Agreeable
Imagination
Unworthy
Fact
Identical
Idea
Suspect
Living
Suspects
History
Employment
Facts
Comparison
Employments
Ideas
Reform
Modes

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But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.
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Pictures must not be too picturesque.
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It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.
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Never try to make anyone like you: you know, and God knows, that one of you is enough.
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Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities?
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I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.
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To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a creditsystem in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man.
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I have heard that death takes us away from ill things, not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man we pronounce the belief of immortality.
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Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver.
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Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
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As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we now possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds.
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As long as any man exists, there is some need of him.
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Everything intercepts us from ourselves.
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Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived.
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The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind.
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The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.
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Great men are sincere.
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Life loiters at the book's first page,-- Ah! could we turn the leaf.
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Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time.
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Manners are the happy ways of doing things each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.
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