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The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance and it straightens itself to the average tendency.

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
Sufficient
Tacks
Distance
Zigzag
Average
Voyage
Line
Voyages
Hundred
Ship
Lines
Tendency
Best
Tendencies
Ships
Straightens

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He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.
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I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.
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The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.
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There is a principle which is the basis of things, which all speech aims to say, and all action to evolve, a simple, quiet, undescribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in us, our rightful lord: we are not to do, but to let do not to work, but to be worked upon.
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Labor is God's education.
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Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits.
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Beauty brings its own fancy price, for all that a man hath will he give for his love.
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Books are the best of things, well used abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.
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The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.
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The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.
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Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use...In God, every end is converted into a new means.
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Life is too short to waste . . . 'Twill soon be dark Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!
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Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.
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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 essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.
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Everything that is popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of philosophers: and this is for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any worth in itself, yet it characterizes the people.
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This very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
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Talent may frolic and juggle genius realizes and adds.
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In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.
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To Be is to live with God.
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