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
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.
Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.
The French woman says, 'I am a woman and a Parisienne, and nothing foreign to me appears altogether human.'
If a man owns land, the land owns him.
The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.
Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it.
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that, if you let it alone, it will let you alone.
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
There is one mind common to all individual men
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the way of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.