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 surest poison is time.
Ne te quaesiveris extra." (Do not seek for things outside of yourself)
The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means to an education.
There is a crack in everything God has made
Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.
All is a riddle, and the key to a riddle...is another riddle.
A man is known by the books he reads.
Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.
I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
Books are for nothing but to inspire
Men are respectable only as they respect.
Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
Common sense is as rare as genius.
I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints