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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
Prisoners
Prisoner
Conflict
Ideas

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Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.
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Among provocative, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching.
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The Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but where the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored.
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No man has ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him.
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Conversation is a game of circles.
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It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.
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History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.
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I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls. I think, sculptureand painting have an effect to teach us manners, and abolish hurry.
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Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.
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Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!-it seems to say,-there is victory yet for all justice and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
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Every day, the sun and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?
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Self-trust is the first secret of success.
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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.
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Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread and meat.
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But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive orbrute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.
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There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise.
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He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us.
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Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
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Persecution readily knits friendship between its victims.
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