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'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Exaggeration
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'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Diets and Dieting
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'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books and Reading
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'Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God
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'Tis 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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Appearance
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A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty
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A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Character
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A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cynics and Cynicism
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A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friends and Friendship
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A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Instinct
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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Consistency
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A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friends and Friendship
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A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friends and Friendship
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A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Power
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A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Greatness
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A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Courage
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A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heroes and Heroism
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A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-love
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A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Faces
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A man is a god in ruins.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Adversity
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A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Taste
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A man is related to all nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature
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A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Anger
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A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Individuality
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A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius
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A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Action
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A man's library is a sort of harem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Library
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A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Faults
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A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Voice
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A man's what he thinks about all day long
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thoughts and Thinking
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A man's wife has more power over him than the state has.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wife
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A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Intelligence and Intellectuals
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A sect or party is an incognito devised to save man from the vexation of thinking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thoughts and Thinking
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A strenuous soul hates cheap success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Success
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A true friend is somebody who can make us do what we can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friends and Friendship
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A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Virtue
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Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Acceptance
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Accept your genius and say what you think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius
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Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. 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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Action
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Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Patience
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All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conservatives
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All diseases run into one. Old age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Disease
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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 had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Commitment
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All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Minorities
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All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trust
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All mankind loves a lover.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love
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All necessary truth is its own evidence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth
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All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Progress
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All promise outruns performance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Promise
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All successful men have agreed in one thing -- they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Consequences
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All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Faith
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All the great ages have been ages of belief.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Belief
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All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Speakers and Speaking
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Always do what you are afraid to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fear
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An empire is an immense egotism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Empire
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An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Institutions
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Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Arts and Artists
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Art is the path of the creator to his work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Arts and Artists
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Artists must be sacrificed to their art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Arts and Artists
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As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Obstacles
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As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Civilization
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As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Creeds
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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty
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As soon as there is life there is danger.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Danger
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As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Control
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As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Villains
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At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hypocrisy
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Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Difficulties
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Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Library
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Be an opener of doors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Opportunity
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71
Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Honesty
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Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty
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Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty
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Beauty rests on necessities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty
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Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Belief
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Beware what you set your heart upon. For it shall surely be yours.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wish and Wishing
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Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thoughts and Thinking
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Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ability
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Blame is safer than praise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Critics and Criticism
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Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books and Reading
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81
By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Machinery
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By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Necessity
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By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Perseverance
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Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Difficulties
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Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Desire
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Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Character
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Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cities and City Life
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Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cities and City Life
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Civilization depends on morality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Civilization
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90
Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Arts and Artists
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91
Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Energy
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92
Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius
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Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Loneliness
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Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Economy and Economics
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Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Vision
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Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Crime and Criminals
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Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Common sense
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Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Focus
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Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Speakers and Speaking
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Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Solitude
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