Quote

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

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Dear to us are those who love us... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
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Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startles out wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.
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Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
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I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.
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As soon as there is life there is danger.
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Free should be the scholar - free and brave.
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The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results.
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The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.
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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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Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.
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We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, or spirit, or poetry,--a narrow belt.
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Everything intercepts us from ourselves.
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When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near.
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The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.
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What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.
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The borrower runs in his own debt.
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What you do thunders above your head so loudly, I cannot hear the words you speak.
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All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
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Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of the prophets. He saw with an open eye the mystery of the soul. . Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man.
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