"A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession."
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Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 168 of 211)
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"Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes."
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"Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist."
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"As thinkers, mankind has ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealists on the power of Thought and Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture."
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"In the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy."
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"The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism."
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"Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,--and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are notequal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit."
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"The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments."
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"A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation."
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"The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life."
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"Fashion which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-code."
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"Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection."
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"The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals. Strength enters just as much as the moral element prevails."
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"Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet."
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"The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth's orbit as a base to fix the parallax of any other star"
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"The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite."
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"But, if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminodas, the Scipio of old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism not of the schools, but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and had given that book immense fame."
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"The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life,--life passed through the fire of thought."
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"In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless, and ice will burn."
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"The goof man, in dealing with his people, taxes them with luxury."
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