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The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.

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
Thought
Polite
Even
Spoken
Connexion
Would
Base
Men
Images
Illustrious
Embrace
Omniscient
Conversation
Obscene
Becomes
Excluded
Words
Vocabulary

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Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet
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Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
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I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine,--and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he ispraised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.
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I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and in large relations whilst they must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error.
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When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.
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We are disgusted by gossip yet it is of importance to keep the angels in their proprieties.
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Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem the shepherd, his lamb the farmer, corn the miner, a stone the painter, his picture the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.
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That you are fair or wise is vain, Or strong, or rich, or generous You must have also the untaught strain That sheds beauty on the rose.
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I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
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It is a luxury to be understood.
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It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character.
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Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know.
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It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.
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So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.
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We find in life exactly what we put into it
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Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.
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Genius is power, talent is applicability.
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We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!
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Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life.
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For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
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