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 vanishing, volatile froth of the present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine.
We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future, but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.
Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends.
Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.
A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.
The Englishman who has lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart.
Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.
A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works.
The populace drags down the gods to their own level.
Every man has a vocation. The talent is the call.
Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.
Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.
There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.
Manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth.