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
I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.
Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,-there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,-that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.
All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.
The poor are only they who feel poor.
The instinct of the people is right.
People who know how to act are never preachers.
Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt.
We are not free to use today, or to promise tomorrow, because we are already mortgaged to yesterday.
When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.
The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.
Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.
A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.
The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.
The peace of the man who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace, but a canting impotence.