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Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.

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
Find
Fulfill
Live
Potential
Right
Please
Ought
Wisdom
Belief
Freedom
Order

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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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.
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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When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We do not yet trust the unknown power of thoughts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. He only is right who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded by worry, fret and anxiety. Finish every day, and be done with it. You have done what you could.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Test of the poet is knowledge of love, For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove Never was poet, of late or of yore, Who was not tremulous with love-lore.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults overthe moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Humility is the secret of the wise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life itself is ... a sleep within a sleep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The music that can deepest reach and cure all ill is cordial speech.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies and iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, and writing and come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than we when [he] threatens his whole threat I will not love you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,--and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial they are notequal to the work they pretend. They lose their way in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson