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
None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.
In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.
There are two laws discreteNot reconciled,Law for man, and law for thing.
Each mind has its own method.
The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.
Nor sequent centuries could hitOrbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
All men are poets at heart.
Blessed are those who have no talent!
None shall rule but the humble,And none but Toil shall have.
For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.
Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech.
The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.
The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men.
Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.