Quote

We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought forthe morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Moments
Morrow
Thought
Gaze
Ideas
Prisoner
Without
Engage
Take
Catch
Children
Fully
Make
Effort
Like
Heaven
Prisoners

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Quotation confesses inferiority.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
From Washington, proverbially the city of distances, through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The State is our neighbors our neighbors are the State.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition, to understand any thing rightly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Man is the dwarf of himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be madeby the reception of beautiful sentiments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
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
Image
Nature tells every secret once.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
My good hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to bite my enemies. In the smoothing the rough hillocks, I smooth my temper.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
People suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is impossible for a person to be cheated by anyone but himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
All is a riddle, and the key to a riddle...is another riddle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is lifted then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Go out of the house to see the moon, and't is mere tinsel it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson