Quote

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

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The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.
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I am become a transparent eyeball.
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Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.
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We shun the rugged battle of fate where strength is born.
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An individual has a healthy personality to the exact degree to which they have the propensity to look for the good in every situation.
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For flowers that bloom about our feet For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet For song of bird, and hum of bee For all things fair we hear or see, Father in heaven, we thank Thee!
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A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so largely on his forces as tolame him a defect pays him revenues on the other side.
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Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.
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The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.
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Yet America is a poem in our eyes its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
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The intellectual man requires a fine bait the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.
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Whom God has put asunder, why should man put together?
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Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.
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If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false statement I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? The streetis as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie.
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When all shoot at one mark, the gods join in the combat.
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The democrat is a young conservative the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.
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What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.
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Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.
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The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.
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We don't grow old. When we cease to grow, we become old.
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