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

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Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
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The masters painted for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone out of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine powers.
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Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.
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I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer, or suffer. I renounce the whole tribe of fero. I embrace absolute life.
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It is dainty to be sick if you have leisure and convenience for it.
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A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.
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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
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Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
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Immitation is suicide.
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Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far.
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I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
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The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.
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Every young man is prone to be misled by the suggestions of his own ill-founded ambition which he mistakes for the promptings of asecret genius, and thence dreams of unrivaled greatness.
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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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Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use...In God, every end is converted into a new means.
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The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.
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There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome alwayswe are invited to work.
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I will not hide my tastes or aversions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions I will seek my own.
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There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.
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Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.
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