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
Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.
Nature: She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.
Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not do.
Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.
In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.
Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.
Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.
Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.
Perpetual modernism is the measure of merit in every work of art.
If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.
Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.