"The hero is suffered to be himself."
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Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 94 of 211)
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"Good nature is stronger than tomahawks."
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"Genius seems to consist merely in trueness of sight, in using such words as show that the man was an eye-witness, and not a repeater of what was told."
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"The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration."
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"Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,-there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,-that no honest seeking goes unrewarded."
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"Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end."
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"Every man is grave alone."
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"The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed."
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"The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome."
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"There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?"
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"The pest of society is egotists."
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"Only by the supernatural is a man strong--only by confiding in the divinity which stirs within us. Nothing is so weak as an egotist--nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral."
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"The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue."
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"O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, I mock at the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretch'd beneath the pines When the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and pride of man, At the Sophist's schools, and the learned clan; For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?"
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"Moller, in his Essay on Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to answer its end would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather virulent and pervasive."
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"Pride is handsome, economical; pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride."
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"The truth, the hope, of any time must be sought in the minorities. Michael Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now, but in his own day his friends were few."
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"The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman."
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"What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent; Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain, Heart's love will meet thee again."
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"And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?"
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