"Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors."
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Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 58 of 211)
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"Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions."
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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."
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"In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of."
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"Whatever you do, you need courage."
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"Souls are not saved in bundles."
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"Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth."
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"Don't hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables and glooms in your conversation. Don't be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don't bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will not help somebody."
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"The best of life is conversation."
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"The refining influence is the study of art, which is the science of beauty; and I find that every man values every scrap of knowledge in art, every observation of his own in it, every hint he has caught from another. For the laws of beauty are the beauty of beauty, and give the mind the same or a higher joy than the sight of it gives the senses. The study of art is of high value to the growth of the intellect."
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"I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults overthe moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub."
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"Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poeticyouth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures."
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"Happy will that house be in which the relations are formed from character; after the highest, and not after the lowest order; the house in which character marries, and not confusion and a miscellany of unavowable motives."
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"The good husband finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed, or in the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or the files of the Department of State."
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"Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts."
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"Do your work, but do your thing."
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"The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose."
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"For the world was built in order around the atoms march in tune; Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder, The sun obeys them, and the moon."
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"The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine."
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"I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue."
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