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
The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly; the peas make no mistake, but come up and show his line.
No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.
The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
People are very inclined to set moral standards for others.
In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.
There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries.
Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.
The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us.
Tart, cathartic virtue.
The virtue in most request is conformity.
I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.
The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.
Only that mind draws me which I cannot read.
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.