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I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals.
Topic: Rhetoric
Source: None
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We must set up a strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past and to come.
Topic: Rumors
Source: None
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Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
Topic: Sacrifice
Source: None
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Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
Topic: Sacrifice
Source: None
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In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
Topic: Safety
Source: None
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Sanity is very rare: every man almost, and every woman, has a dash of madness.
Topic: Sanity
Source: None
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Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old.
Topic: Scripture
Source: The Problem
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The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tablets yet unbroken:
The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
Topic: Scripture
Source: The Problem
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Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
Topic: Sculpture
Source: The Problem
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In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or
say of the Laocoon how it might be made difference? A
masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of
being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
Topic: Sculpture
Source: Society and Solitude--Art
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From the feet, Hercules.
[Lat., Ex pede Herculem.]
Topic: Sculpture
Source: Society and Solitude--Art
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Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.
Topic: Self-sacrifice
Source: None
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Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.
Topic: Selfishness
Source: None
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The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
Topic: Senses
Source: None
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Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists--talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.
Topic: Sentiment
Source: None
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When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it
proved an intellectual trick,--no more. They eat your service
like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel
you, and delight in you all the time.
Topic: Service
Source: Essays--Of Gifts
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A person's life is limited but serving the people is limitless.
I want to devote my limited life to serving the people
limitlessly.
Topic: Service
Source: Essays--Of Gifts
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Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I
have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred
blessings on me.
Topic: Service
Source: Essays--Of Gifts
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The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service
of others.
Topic: Service
Source: Essays--Of Gifts
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The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted
until within this century.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Topic: Shakespeare
Source: Letters and Social Aims--Quotation and Originality
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Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
Topic: Shakespeare
Source: May Day and Other Pieces--Solution (l. 39)
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What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of
religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled?
What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office,
or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered?
What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon?
What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What
lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What
gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?
Topic: Shakespeare
Source: Representative Men--Shakespeare
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The true ship is the ship builder.
Topic: Ships
Source: Essays--Of History
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When rats leave a sinking ship, where exactly do they think
they're going?
Topic: Ships
Source: Essays--Of History
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The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.
Topic: Shoemaking
Source: Letters and Social Aims--Greatness
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If you had taken off the shoe then, at length you would feel in
what part it pinched you.
[Lat., Si calceum induisses, tum demum sentires qua parte te
urgeret.]
Topic: Shoemaking
Source: Letters and Social Aims--Greatness
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Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.
Topic: Simplicity
Source: None
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Sincerity is the highest compliment you can pay.
Topic: Sincerity
Source: None
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Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
Topic: Sincerity
Source: None
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Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.
Topic: Singing
Source: Essays--The Poet
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Skepticism is slow suicide.
Topic: Skepticism
Source: None
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I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community
can constitute a state. I think we must get rid of slavery or we
must get rid of freedom.
Topic: Slavery
Source: The Assault upon Mr. Sumner's Speech
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Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Topic: Snow
Source: The Snow-Storm
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Come, see the north-wind's masonry,
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, naught cares he
For number or proportion.
Topic: Snow
Source: The Snow-Storm
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Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.
Topic: Speech
Source: None
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Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force.
Topic: Spirit
Source: None
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The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.
Topic: Spirituality
Source: None
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Daughter of heaven and earth, coy Spring,
With sudden passion languishing,
Teaching barren moors to smile,
Painting pictures mile on mile,
Holds a cup of cowslip wreaths
Whence a smokeless incense breathes.
Topic: Spring
Source: May Day (st. 1)
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Cunning is strength withheld.
Topic: Strength
Source: None
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We acquire the strength we have overcome.
Topic: Strength
Source: None
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Concentration is the secret of strength.
Topic: Strength
Source: None
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The studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale,
their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without
sleep, the day a fear of interruption,--pallor, squalor, hunger,
and egotism. If you come near them and see what conceits they
entertain--they are abstractionists, and spend their days and
nights in dreaming some dream; in expecting the homage of society
to some precious scheme built on a truth, but destitute of
proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application,
and of all energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize
it.
Topic: Students
Source: Representative Men--Montaigne
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One thing is forever good;
That one thing is Success.
Topic: Success
Source: Fate
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Born for success, he seemed
With grace to win, with heart to hold,
With shining gifts that took all eyes.
Topic: Success
Source: In Memoriam (l. 60)
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If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and
there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Topic: Success
Source: Of the American Scholar, in "Nature Addresses and Lectures"
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If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or
can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs,
than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his
house, tho it be in the woods. And if a man knows the law,
people will find it out, tho he live in a pine shanty, and resort
to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the
prisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint landscape, and convey
into oils and ochers all the enchantments of spring or autumn; or
can liberate or intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious
songs and verses, 'tis certain that the secret can not be kept:
the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and
tens and fifties to his door.
Topic: Success
Source: Works (vol. VIII), in his "Journal" (1855) p, 528 (ed. 1912)
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If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, tho it be in the woods.
Topic: Success
Source: None
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Success: To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!
Topic: Success
Source: None
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We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.
Topic: Superstition
Source: None
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The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Topic: Suspicion
Source: None
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