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What lies behind us & what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

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God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.

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I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know ...more

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Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.

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He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his fat...more

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When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope t...more

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A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of...more

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Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like man...more

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I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

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Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to rig...more

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The life of truth is cold.

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Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

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Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among hi...more