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
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes about
If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue.
Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.
All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning.
This whole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone tocount myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person who I pay with money, whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each asked of the other.
Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.
The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritualcreation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be already on the way to the highest.
Our life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast- flowingvigor.
We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.
All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.
No facts to me are sacred; none are profane.
Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.