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
When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.
Every individual strives to grow and exclude, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature.
A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.
The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.
Outside among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom.
The secret of drunkenness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.
All poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments when they were superior to themselves, -when a light, a freedom, a power came to them which lifted them to performances far better than they could reach at other times.
There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.
Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.
Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there.
Life is a series of surprises.
The dearest events are summer-rain.
I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.
A mob is a society obodies, voluntarily bereaving themselves oreason, and traversing its work. The mob is man, voluntarily descending to the nature othe beast. Its fit hour oactivity is night; its actions are insane, like its whole constitution.