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 dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living.
A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.
Things have their laws as well as men, and things refuse to be trifled with.
There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law.
Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.
The great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man.
The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.
A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.
History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought.
In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.
Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor because he was not lying in wait for these.
There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.
A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.
If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.