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
Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for being: Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! I never sought to ask, I never knew: But, in my simple ignorance suppose The selfsame power that brought me there brought you.
Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.
Not gold but only men can makeA people great and strong;Men who for truth and honors sakeStand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep,Who dare while others flyThey build a nations pillars deepAnd lift them to the sky.
Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.
O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.
Between cultivated minds the first interview is the best.
In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac.
A poem, a sentence, causes us to see ourselves. I be, and I see my being, at the same time.
The life of labor does not make men, but drudges.
What is there of the divine in a load of brick? What ... in a barber shop? ... Much. All.
War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.
War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.
A woman's strength is the unresistible might of weakness.
A beautiful woman is a practical poet.