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
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
God screens us evermore from premature ideas.
People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.
Revolutions go not backward.
We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.
There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.
There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?