"The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 93 of 211)
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"The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool."
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"Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it."
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"Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence."
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"For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing."
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"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism."
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"Let a stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear."
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"Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself."
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"He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time."
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"Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul."
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"The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future."
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"A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity."
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"Men lose their tempers in defending their taste."
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"Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty."
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"The forest is my loyal friend A Delphic shrine to me."
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"Quotation confesses inferiority."
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"Greek architecture is the flowering of geometry."
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"No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains."
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"Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?"
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"The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person."
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