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
Freedom is not the right to do as you please, but the liberty to do as you should.
The ocean is a large drop; a drop is a small ocean.
Let us learn the meaning of economy. Economy is a high human office,--a sacrament when its aim is grand, when it is the prudence of simple tastes, when it is practised for freedom or for love or devotion.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.
...man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the center of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man.
Nature is the symbol of Spirit.
Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of Nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.
In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.
The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.
The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.
A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is.
The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition.
The two parties which divide the State, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made ... Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities ... Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.
None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.