the mystic must be steadily told, — All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, — universal signs, instead of these village symbols, — and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

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About Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882) was an American philosopher, essayist, and poet.

Biography information from Wikiquote

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Additional quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.