"The riddle of the age has for each a private solution."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 116 of 211)
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"The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else."
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"We do what we can, and then make a theory to prove our performance the best."
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"The question is whether [suicide] is the way out, or the way in."
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"We thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver."
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"All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings' palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicated the one miracle of intellectual enlargement."
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"Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms."
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"Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law! He offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games, where the first- born of the world are the competitors."
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"The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it might deify both."
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"For, when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols of love. Those relations to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of character, the most solid enjoyment."
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"The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science."
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"Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered."
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"Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,--a total perversion of opinion;society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live."
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"There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; alwayswe are invited to work."
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"The best nations are those most widely related; and navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer ofnations."
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"Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and concentration to men, and seems to be much used in Nature for fabrics in which local and spasmodic energy is required."
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"All poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments when they were superior to themselves, -when a light, a freedom, a power came to them which lifted them to performances far better than they could reach at other times."
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"Black men built the railroads, not blue eyes."
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"There comes a time in each man's education in which he comes to the conclusion that envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide, and society in in conspiracy against each one of its members."
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"It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascinationfor all educated Americans."
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