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
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.
I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.
For the world was built in order around the atoms march in tune; Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder, The sun obeys them, and the moon.
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him [H.D. Thoreau]. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.
The virtue in most request is conformity.
Tart, cathartic virtue.
The world is his who can see through its pretension.
The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.
The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us.
Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.
There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries.
The only gift is a portion of thyself . . . the poet brings his poem; the shepherd his lamb. . . .
In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.
One single idea may have greater weight than all the men, animals, and machines for a century.