Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”
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“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.”
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“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
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“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
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“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
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“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
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“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
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“Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.”
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“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”
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“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
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“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
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“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”
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“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
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“Men are what their mothers made them.”
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“All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.”
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“A man is what he thinks about all day long.”
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“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.”
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“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
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“For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.”
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“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.”
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“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”
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“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
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“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”
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“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”
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“Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.”
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“The reward of a thing well done is having done it.”
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“Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.”
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“The first wealth is health.”
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“All mankind love a lover.”
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“Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.”
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“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
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“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”
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“Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.”
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“We aim above the mark to hit the mark.”
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“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”
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“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.”
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“The earth laughs in flowers.”
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“A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.”
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“It is not length of life, but depth of life.”
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“Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.”
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“Money often costs too much.”
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“Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.”
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“The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.”
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“Hitch your wagon to a star.”
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“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”
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“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
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“Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.”
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“Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
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“To be great is to be misunderstood.”
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“Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.”
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“There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.”
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“The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.”
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“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
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“A great man is always willing to be little.”
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“Every wall is a door.”
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“The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.”
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“Flowers… are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.”
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“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
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“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.”
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“In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.”
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“Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.”
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“Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.”
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“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”
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“We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.”
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“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.”
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“The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.”
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“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
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“The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.”
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“The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.”
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“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.”
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“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”
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“In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.”
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“Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.”
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“Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.”
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“Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.”
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“The ancestor of every action is a thought.”
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“Every artist was first an amateur.”
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“Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.”
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“The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.”
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“Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.”
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“People only see what they are prepared to see.”
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“No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.”
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“Beauty without expression is boring.”
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“We acquire the strength we have overcome.”
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“Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.”
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“Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.”
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“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”
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“It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'”
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“Make yourself necessary to somebody.”
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“We must be our own before we can be another's.”
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“Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.”
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“There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.”
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“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.”
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“Good men must not obey the laws too well.”
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“Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.”
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“Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.”
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“The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.”
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“With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.”
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“As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.”
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“In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.”
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“Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.”
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“Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.”
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“The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.”
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“Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.”
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“America is another name for opportunity.”
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“Science does not know its debt to imagination.”
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“A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.”
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“A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.”
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“Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.”
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“The faith that stands on authority is not faith.”
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“The highest revelation is that God is in every man.”
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“We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.”
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“Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.”
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“Every burned book enlightens the world.”
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“Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.”
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“Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.”
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“A man in debt is so far a slave.”
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“Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.”
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“We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.”
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“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
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“Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.”
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“Every man I meet is in some way my superior.”
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“Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.”
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“A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.”
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“Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.”
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“For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.”
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“We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.”
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“Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.”
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“I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.”
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“Pictures must not be too picturesque.”
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“We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.”
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“A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.”
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“It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.”
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“The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.”
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“What you are comes to you.”
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“Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.”
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“A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.”
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“We are always getting ready to live but never living.”
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“The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.”
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“We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.”
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“Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.”
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“No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.”
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“Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.”
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“The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.”
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“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
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“Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.”
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“God enters by a private door into every individual.”
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“Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.”
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“Some books leave us free and some books make us free.”
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“The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.”
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“Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.”
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“The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.”
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“If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.”
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“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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“Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.”
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“Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.”
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“As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.”
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“The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.”
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“Every hero becomes a bore at last.”
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“Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.”
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“Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.”
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“In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.”
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“If a man can… make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”
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“As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.”
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“Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”
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“People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.”
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“Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.”
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“Power and speed be hands and feet.”
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“Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.”
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“We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.”
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“I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.”
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“Nothing external to you has any power over you.”
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“Our best thoughts come from others.”
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“A good indignation brings out all one's powers.”
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“We are wiser than we know.”
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“It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.”
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“Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.”
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“In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.”
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“A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes.”
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“Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.”
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“We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.”
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“People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”
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“The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.”
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“Genius always finds itself a century too early.”
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“As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.”
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“Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.”
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“We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.”
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“The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?”
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“Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.”
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“If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.”
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“Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.”
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“When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.”
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“Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.”
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“People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.”
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“Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.”
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“Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.”
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“The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.”
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“One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.”
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“Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.”
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“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.”
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“The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”
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“O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.”
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“The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.”
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“Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.”
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“Life is our dictionary.”
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“The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.”
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“There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.”
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“Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.”
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“Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.”
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“It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.”
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“What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.”
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“I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.”
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“There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.”
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“Nature hates calculators.”
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“Revolutions go not backward.”
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“Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.”
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“People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.”
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“A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.”
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“Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.”
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“There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.”
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“There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.”
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“Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'”
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“Without electricity, the air would rot.”
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“Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.”
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“Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.”
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“Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.”
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“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”
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“Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.”
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“There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.”
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“The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.”
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“All diseases run into one, old age.”
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“Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?”
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“Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.”
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“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”
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“Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?”
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“It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.”
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“We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.”
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“What is a farm but a mute gospel?”
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“Reality is a sliding door.”
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“A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.”
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“No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.”
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“The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.”
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“Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.”
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“Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.”
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“There is a tendency for things to right themselves.”
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“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”
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“As soon as there is life there is danger.”
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“Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.”
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“Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.”
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“Children are all foreigners.”
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“When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.”
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“The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.”
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“God screens us evermore from premature ideas.”
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“Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.”
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“There is always safety in valor.”
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“Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.”
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“It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.”
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“Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.”
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“Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.”
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“I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.”
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“The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.”
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“I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.”
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“Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.”
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“A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.”
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“Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.”
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“The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.”
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“I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.”