"To eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 169 of 211)
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"What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the rail-road car!"
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"The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity."
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"Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other estates in the realm; and where fame and secular promotion are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the unanimous respect of all cultivated nations."
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"It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling."
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"Everything that is popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of philosophers: and this is for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any worth in itself, yet it characterizes the people."
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"A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school,preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone his life, but lives already."
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"It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character."
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"A right rule for a club would be, Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires people who are not surprised andshocked, who do and let do, and let be, who sink trifles, and know solid values, and who take a great deal for granted."
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"The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not."
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"Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake."
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"Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits."
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"Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another."
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"I unsettle all things."
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"Throw a stone into the stream and the ripples that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence."
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"I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth."
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"The student is to read history actively and not passively."
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"A friend may be nature's most magnificent creation."
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"There are books... which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences."
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"So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit."
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