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The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.

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
Longer
Passings
Wand
Imagination
Demands
Wands
Beautiful
Begins
Statue
Defined
Incomprehensible
Passing
Measuring
Active
Statues
Criticism
Compass
Demand
Sculpture

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Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep.
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Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.
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Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the intimated purpose, express character.
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An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.
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None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.
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Friendship is an order of nobility from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.
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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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Every man is as lazy as he dares to be.
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Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside.
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For you, o broker, there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys.
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I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.
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From Washington, proverbially the city of distances, through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.
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Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
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The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.
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People wish to be settled only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
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Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never shines in which this element may not work.
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To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
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Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men.
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Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
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Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.
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