Quote

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces be sure of that. And a man will worship something ... That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Age: 78 †
Born: 1803
Born: May 25
Died: 1882
Died: April 27
Biographer
Diarist
Essayist
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Something
Therefore
Men
Becoming
Behooves
Life
Names
Dominates
Sure
Worshipping
Faces
Gods
Write
Determine
Character
Careful
Writing
Worship

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Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.
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An action is the perfection and publication of thought.
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In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,--no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.
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Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.
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We want a state of things in which crime will not pay, a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man.
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Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
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There is a property in the horizon which no man has, but he whose eyes can integrate all the parts,--that is, the poet.
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Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
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The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
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The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.
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Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her.
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The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.
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Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.
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After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.
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What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy only the precursor of the reason.
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The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
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And dazzling memory revive.Refresh the faded tints, Recut the aged prints, And write my old adventures, with the pen Which, on the first day, drew Upon the tablets blue The dancing Pleiads, and the eternal men.
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Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
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It is one of the biggest blessing that you can be stupid with your true friends and behave like you shame to do elsewhere
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Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.
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