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We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

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
Turns
Golden
Actually
Pages
Read
Hundred
Funny
Turn
Book
Books
Four
Volume
Five
Civil
Reading
Sentences

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy only the precursor of the reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual the wise man wonders at the usual.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Only a biker knows why a dog sticks his head out of a car window.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not Devil's wine, but God's wine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is also something excellent in every audience,--the capacity of virtue. They are ready to be beatified.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The judge weighs the arguments and puts a brave face on the matter, and since there must be a decision, decides as he can, and hopes he has done justice and given satisfaction to the community
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A sleeping child gives me the impression of a traveler in a very far country.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man is the will, and woman the sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment the sail when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As long as civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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By God, I will not obey this filthy enactment!
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 sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Teach the children! It is painting in fresco.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream neither is it a disease but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.
Ralph Waldo Emerson