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Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character.

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
Bases
Profound
Talent
Character
Sincerity
Basis

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The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.
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But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art.
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Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience.
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Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at right time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
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The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.
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And striving to be Man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.
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What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
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In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.
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I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls. I think, sculptureand painting have an effect to teach us manners, and abolish hurry.
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Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
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The aid we can give each other is only incidental, lateral, and sympathetic.
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Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market.
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We don't grow old. When we cease to grow, we become old.
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The universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest.
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Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
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Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.
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Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.
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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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By God, I will not obey this filthy enactment!
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I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.
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