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

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

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Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.
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Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.
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I quote another man's saying unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.
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The beautiful is never plentiful.
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Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.
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In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.
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Commonsense is the wick of the candle.
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The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
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My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeinga Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.
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Where there is no vision a people perish.
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What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.
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Reality is a sliding door.
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Our prayers are prophets.
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The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.
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An actually existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel.
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Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.
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The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.
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It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.
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Tomorrow is a new day begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
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Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there.
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