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
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.
The world is his who can see through its pretension.
In America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity.
America is a country of young men.
In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.
The most Indian thing about the Indian is surely not his moccasins or his calumet, his wampum or his stone hatched, but traits of character and sagacity, skill, or passion.
We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.
Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.
The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics andtrade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.
Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.
I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.
In this our talking America, we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power ofbeing greatly useful.