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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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Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In dreams we are true poets we create the persons of the drama we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours and we listen with surprise to what they say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But there is no end to the praise of books, to the value of the library. Who shall estimate their influence on our population where all the millions read and write ? It is the joy of nations that man can communicate all his thoughts, discoveries and virtues to records that may last for centuries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.
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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When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Rude poets of the tavern hearth, squandering your unquoted mirth, which keeps the ground, and never soars, while jake retorts, and reuben roars tough and screaming, as birch-bark, goes like bullet to its mark while the solid curse and jeer never balk the waiting ear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A nation never falls but by suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Such is the active power of good temperament! Great sweetness of temper neutralizes such vast amounts of acid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten even so, they have made me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong
Ralph Waldo Emerson