There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

christ s ideals for living serenity

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It is awful to look into the mind of man and see how free we are–to what frightful excesses our vices may run under the whited walls of a respectable reputation. Outside, among you fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances,—a hundred things you cannot do: but inside, — the terrible freedom!

emerson the mind on fire, p. 127

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For the best part?of every mind is not that which [a person] knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestion, tantalizing unpossessed before him.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 200

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In every book [one] finds passages which seem confidences or asides, hidden from all else, and unmistakably meant for his ear. No book has worthy by itself, but by the relation to what you have from many other books, it weighs.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 220

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Make your own Bible. Select and collect all those words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of a trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 241

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Insulate a man and you annihilate him. He cannot unfold, he cannot live without a world.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 258

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What is the end of human life? It is not, believe me, the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make a fortune, but it is, in few words, that he should explore himself.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 261

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Genius is always the enemy of genius by over influence.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 264

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The roots of what is great and high must still be in the common life.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 264

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His own culture-the unfolding of his nature, is the chief end of man.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 271

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That Better we call the Ideal. Ideal is not opposed to Real, but to Actual. The Ideal is the Real. The Actual is but the apparent and the temporary.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 271

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The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbance can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 273

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If peace is to be maintained it must be by brave men who have come up to the same height as the hero, namely the will to carry their life in their hand, and stake it at any instant for their principle, but who have gone one step beyond the hero, and will not seek another man’s life.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 276

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There are people who have an appetite for grief?there are natures so doomed that no prosperity can soothe the ragged and dishelved desolation. They mishear; and misbehold; they suspect; and dread.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 310

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The student is to read history actively and not passively, to esteem his own life the text and books the commentary.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 322

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In other words, there is properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 322

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For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch bearers, but children of the fire, made of it.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 372

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Art is the path of the creator to his work.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 374

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A new day, a new harvest, new duties, new men, new fields of thought, new powers call you, and ruins me with a squalid indigence which nothing but death can adequately symbolize.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 384

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[N]o man has learned anything until he knows that every day is the judgment day.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 400

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To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 403

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We too must write Bibles.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 417

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[W]e bury in an undefined procrastination all our obligations.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 46

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Society pays heavily for the economy it derives from the division of labor.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 471

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Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 493

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The true meaning of spiritual is real.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 494

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[I]t is not possible to extricate oneself from the questions in which your age is involved.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 496

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This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear with its hopes and invitations to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays

emerson the mind on fire, p. 543

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The tongue of flame, the picture the newspapers give, at the late fire in Liverpool, of the mountains of burning cotton over which the he flames arose to twice their height, the volcano also, from which the conflagration rises toward the zenith an appreciable distance toward the stars— these are the most affecting symbols of what man should be. A spark of fire is infinitely deep, but a mass of fire reaching from earth upward into heaven, this is the sign of the robust, united, burning, radiant soul.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 572

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If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 80

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A portion of the truth, bright and sublime, lives in every moment in every mind.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 82

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To believe your own thought, that is genius.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 99

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There is in every human mind a power greater than that mind.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 99

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It is only so far as you find Christianity within your own soul that I recommend it.

emerson the mind on fire, p. 99

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I figure to myself the world as a hollow temple, and every individual mind as an exponent of some sacred part therein, as if each man was a jet of flame affixed to some capital, or node, or angle, or triglyph, or rosette, or spandyl, bringing out its beauty and symmetry to the eye by his shining. But when the jet of light is gone, the groined arch and fluted column remain beautiful, and can in an instant be lighted again and vindicated.

emerson the mind on fire pp 475 476

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When I look at the rainbow I find myself the center of its arch. But so are you; and so is the man that sees it a mile from both of us. So also the globe is round, and every man therefore stands on the top. King George, and the chimney sweep no less.

emerson the mind on fire pp 94 95

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