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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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The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or place.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.
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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To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a creditsystem in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron show,--the rootsof all things are in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Cupid is a casuist, a mystic, and a cabalist,-- Can your lurking thought surprise, And interpret your device, . . . . All things wait for and divine him,-- How shall I dare to malign him?
Ralph Waldo Emerson