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Life is to be lived, not controlled.

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
Controlled
Lived
Life

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, or spirit, or poetry,--a narrow belt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain. The mind does not create what it perceives, anymore than the eye creates the rose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Humility is the secret of the wise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also as the green grass.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great is the art, Great be the manners, of the bard. He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number But, leaving rule and pale forethought, He shall aye climb For his rhyme. Pass in, pass in, the angels say
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Who gave thee, O Beauty, The keys of this breast,-- Too credulous lover Of blest and unblest? Say, when in lapsed ages Thee knew I of old? Or what was the service For which I was sold?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education oftenlabors to silence and obstruct.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sorrow makes us all children again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Read proudly--put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it? I am quite ready to be charmed, but I shall not make-believe I am charmed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Teach the children! It is painting in fresco.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but where the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored.
Ralph Waldo Emerson