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
Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.
Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.
Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
I admire answers to which no answers can be made.
Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his.
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.
The shot heard round the world.
He that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves
The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.
You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.
Where there is no vision a people perish.
Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend, Unnerves his strength, invites his end.