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
Cupid is a casuist, a mystic, and a cabalist,-- Can your lurking thought surprise, And interpret your device, . . . . All things wait for and divine him,-- How shall I dare to malign him?
The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him.
Genius has no taste for weaving sand.
All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear.
Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative.
There is no eloquence without a man behind it.
It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can speak can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or
Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.
The pleasure of eloquence is in greatest part owing often to the stimulus of the occasion which produces it- - to the magic of sympathy, which exalts the feeling of each by radiating on him the feeling of all.
In eloquence, the great triumphs of the art are when the orator is lifted above himself; when consciously he makes himself the mere tongue of the occasion and the hour, and says what cannot but be said. Hence the term "abandonment" to describe the self- surrender of the orator. Not his will, but the principle on which he is horsed, the great connection and crisis of events, thunder in the ear of the crowd.
Eloquence shows the power and possibility of man.
Echo waits with art and care And will the faults of song repair.
It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.
Art and power will go on as they have done,--will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time.