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The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.

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
Wisdom
Studious
Thought
Monopoly
Think
Degree
Thinking
Direction
Degrees
Truly
Learned
Violence

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
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The Times are the masquerade of the eternities trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.
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The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.
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Fear always springs from ignorance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely thatwhich all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The simplest words,--we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Though we travel the world over to find beauty, we must carry it with us or we find it not . . . The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in beholders.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man of no conversation should smoke.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The President proclaims war, and those Senators who dissent are not those who know better, but those who can afford to...Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The first wealth is health.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health he must be at the top of his condition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson