Quote

Love should make joy but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.

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
Nobody
Neck
Joy
Societies
Church
Necks
Pain
Sunday
School
Schools
Pauper
Make
Unhappy
Yoke
Love
Charity
Benevolence
Please
Churches

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I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
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Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them.
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The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.
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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.
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The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School.
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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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The two terrors that discourage creativity and creative living are fear of public opinion and undue reverence for one's own consistency.
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No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.
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Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his.
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Books are the best of things if well used if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
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Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusades a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
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Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
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There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
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