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
Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.
Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.
We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has not superfluous parts; which exactly answers its ends.
Ideas must work through the brains and arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams
No dissenter rides in his coach for three generations; he infallibly falls into the Establishment
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree.
Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee, and do not try to make the universe a blind alley
Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting - a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.
Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life; nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that
Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.