"Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 85 of 211)
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"Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something."
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"When the man is at home, his standing in society is well known and quietly taken; but when he is abroad, it is problematical, and is dependent on the success of his manners."
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"In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes."
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"We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim."
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"No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and so ridiculous."
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"The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later."
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"Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine."
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"Duty grows everywhere--like children, like grass."
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"The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary."
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"The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose."
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"Conformity is the ape of harmony."
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"Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society. ... Society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do."
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"The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life."
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"Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance."
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"Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and...it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path.... He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it."
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"Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore he is the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified."
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"We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited."
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"Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places."
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"When duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can."
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