Quote

We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are thevictims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.

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
Among
Fetch
Perhaps
Arrive
Fire
Markets
Water
Shops
Moment
Rational
Running
Details
Fortnight
Moments
Shoes
Mended
Made
Clothes
Errands

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When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.
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Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes what a satire this is on government.
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Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor because he was not lying in wait for these.
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Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.
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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?
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A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.
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Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
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Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.
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Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.
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It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.
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Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
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Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.
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Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve anyone it must husband its resources to live. But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities.
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I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.
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When a man becomes cultivated, he develops a new respect for who he is. This causes him to be ashamed of his past identification of himself and others according to things, i.e. property.
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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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We love it because it is self dependent, self derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
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I quote another man's saying unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.
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The best of life is conversation.
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The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one's main purpose to serve a job here and there.
Ralph Waldo Emerson