Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson, known professionally as Waldo Emerson, was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth25 May 1803
CountryUnited States of America
Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest
The sun shines today also.
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.
Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.
We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.
I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.
Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.
Eyes...They speak all languages.
Imitation cannot go above its model.
The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.