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
You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.
All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.
Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at right time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
The dice of God are always loaded.
Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.
In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.
The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.
Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.
If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.
The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat, men to whom a crisis, which intimidates and paralyzes the majority, comes as graceful and beloved as a bride!
Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.
We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.
Circumstance does not make the man. Circumstance reveals man to himself.