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Society is full of infirm people, who incessantly summon others to serve them. They contrive everywhere to exhaust for their single comfort the entire means and appliances of that luxury to which our invention has yet attained.

Society is full of infirm people, who incessantly summon others to serve them. They contrive everywhere to exhaust for their single comfort the entire means and appliances of that luxury to which our invention has yet attained.

Approximate author period: c. 1842 AD · industrial

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Attribution & collection notes
Author or tradition
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Attribution: attributed
Country attributed
Not established
A country attribution does not establish the earliest origin.
Historical period
Approximate author period: c. 1842 AD · industrial
author lifetime midpoint (1803–1882)
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken.
Recorded source
Dictionary of Quotations (1893) (1893 AD)

Printed citation: Emerson. · page_396

A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.

The voice behind the words.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Photographic portrait, 1857

Listed in the author section of Bartlett’s ninth-edition anthology, in the linked 1905 printing. Dates reflect that historical edition and may differ from modern scholarship.

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