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
The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.
The delicate muses lose their head if their attention is once diverted. Perhaps if you were successful abroad in talking and dealing with men, you would not come back to your bookshelf and your task. When the spirit chooses you for its scribe to publish some commandment, it makes you odious to men and men odious to you, and you shall accept that loathsomeness with joy. The moth must fly to the lamp, and you must solve those questions though you die.
What has been done in the world - the works of genius - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest.
Let not the author eat up the man, so that he shall be all balcony and no house.
Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so.
A man must be in sympathy with society around him, or else, not wish to be in sympathy with it. If neither of these two, he must be wretched.
An artist spends himself like the crayon in his hand, till he is all gone.
In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.
In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended.
The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage.
The difference between talent and genius is in the direction of the current: in genius, it is from within outward; in talent from without inward.
I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion of well-doing and daring.
Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.
The only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.