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We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.

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
Prize
Wise
Books
Reading
Book

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect... it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labour of a wise and spiritual nation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely thatwhich all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When we see a special reformer we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your own virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A day is a miniature eternity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Who does not sometimes envy the good and the brave, who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds,--epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them they will never forget it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life depends upon one's actions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The education of the will is the object of our existence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson