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
Many a profound genius, I suppose, who fills the world with fame of his exploding renowned errors, is yet everyday posed and baffled by trivial questions at his own supper table.
There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.
To fill the hour; that is happiness to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.
A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.
If you cannot be free be as free as you can.
The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.
All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.
The mark of a man of the world is absence of pretension.
The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once.
Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.
To believe in luck, if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, is skepticism.
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.
Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate; debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.