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
Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.
The forest is my loyal friend A Delphic shrine to me.
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.
But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to seserve that you should.
If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.
Let a man then know his worth and keep things under his feet.
I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me.
We love it because it is self dependent, self derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues.
He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.