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
In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.
Power and speed be hands and feet.
There is always safety in valor.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Nature hates calculators.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.
Greatness is a property for which no man can receive credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.
Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.
Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares