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
dance art eye
Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness,to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms.
time animal joy
For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy.
sports time space
Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time.
time moments eternity
A moment is a concentrated eternity.
time heart men
Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to bepainted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains; and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,--these eat up the hours.
time illusion conviction
There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.
time stars book
There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours.
hope time sleep
We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.
men power victory
Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world.
giving judging doe
Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience.
blow air order
A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of Right and Necessity. It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit.
self law good-man
The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Necessity is the law of all who are not self-possessed.
children order chaos
The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.
children book arms
We sometimes observe that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem tomeasure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented if you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations.