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It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling.

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
Answers
Committees
Turn
Rare
Waiting
Precious
Call
Exists
Carp
Turns
Wait
Commons
Easy
Answer
Colleges
House
Genius
Committee
Also
College
Eccentric

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At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.
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Our age is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year.
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Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.
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If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.
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Good criticism is very rare and always precious.
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You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
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A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.
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Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.
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As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world
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Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.
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To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself nothing, but the triumph of principles.
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In the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.
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There is always a best way of doing everything.
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The whole of what we know is a system of compensation. Every defect in one manner is made up in another. Every suffering is rewarded every sacrifice is made up every debt is paid.
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The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.
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We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought forthe morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.
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