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
Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.
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.
Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.
In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.
If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
[T]omorrow is a new day. You shall begin it well & serenely, & with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day ... is too dear with its hopes & invitations to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.
Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship,like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.
A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.