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
Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is with-held, the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.
I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.
Repose and cheerfulness is the badge of the gentleman; repose in energy.
The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.
For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training; religion of character is so apt to be invaded.
Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten; bring them hand to hand, and they are feeble folk.
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.
We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents.
Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.
A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of fine arts.
A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.