Quote

Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being.

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
Law
Peaceful
Truth
Reputation
Every
Keeps
Men
Brings
Love
Loves
Suspense
Life
Choice
Respects
Highest
Repose
Choices
Solid

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I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.
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For, truly speaking, whoever provokes me to a good act or thought has given me a pledge of his fidelity to virtue,--he has come under the bonds to adhere to that cause to which we are jointly attached.
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We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.
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When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.
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Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.
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I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.
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Plato says that the punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse men and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as the penalty of abstaining to speak,--that they shall hear worse orators than themselves.
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We cannot let our angels go we do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in.
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Every day, the sun and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?
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Thought is the seed of action.
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Belief and love,--a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the centre of nature, and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe.
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The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.
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I am a part and parcel of God.
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The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the heir.
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I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion, the other, private opinion one, fame, the other, desert one, feats, the other, humility one, lucre, the other, love one, monopoly, and the other, hospitality of mind.
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How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.
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The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.
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The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.
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Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson