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
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me; not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.
Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands.
Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet.
Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
Do not follow where the path may lead.
The greatest homage to truth is to use it.
Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too.
The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.
Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.
You cannot sincerely try to help another without helping yourself
Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?
It is one soul which animates all men.
God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.