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
Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust in another mouth.
Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity.
Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books...
The borrowing is often honest enough, and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.
Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities?
Nature, as we know her, is no saint.... She comes eating and drinking and sinning.
Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love.
Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!
Ah Fate, cannot a man Be wise without a beard? East, West, from Beer to Dan, Say, was it never heard That wisdom might in youth be gotten, Or wit be ripe before 't was rotten?
With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together.
[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand....
Tis curious that we only believe as deeply as we live.
Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind.