“In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.”

—  Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Goethe; or, the Writer,” pp. 271-272
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

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American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803–1882

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