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
An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.
We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.
Justice satisfies everybody, and justice alone.
There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.
Honor and fortune exist for him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.
Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
Hume's doctrine was that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.
The great make its feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.
Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.
Great men are sincere.
A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants.
Governments have their origin in the moral identity of men.
All men in the abstract are just and good.
When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.