"We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 107 of 211)
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"The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing."
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"The simplest words,--we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire."
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"Genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it."
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"Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true."
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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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"How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely."
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"Will is the measure of power. To a great genius there must be a great will. If the thought is not a lamp to the will, does not proceed to an act, the wise are imbecile. He alone is strong and happy who has a will. The rest are herds. He uses; they are used. He is of the Maker; they are of the Made. Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men. When it appears in a man he is a hero, and all metaphysics are at fault."
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"Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer."
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"It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other."
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"It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon."
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"The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral."
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"Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes; what a satire this is on government."
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"Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative."
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"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars."
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"Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop."
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"The shows of the day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, andthe like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality."
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"We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlars."
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"Not gold, but only man can make a people great and strong; men who, for truth and honor's sake, stand fast and suffer long."
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"Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusades a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant."
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