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We are the prisoners of ideas.

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
Ideas
Prisoners
Prisoner
Conflict

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make asally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration.
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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For flowers that bloom about our feet For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet For song of bird, and hum of bee For all things fair we hear or see, Father in heaven, we thank Thee!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every man I meet is in some way my superior...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Sometimes we receive the power to say yes to life. Then peace enters us and makes us whole.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Do your thing, and I shall know you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every advantage has its tax.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Imitation cannot go above its model.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never shines in which this element may not work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We may be partial, but Fate is not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson