Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Every artist was first an amateur.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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