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 efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.
If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.
We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns.
Man is made of the same atoms the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure.
The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
Enlarge not thy destiny, said the oracle: endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge.
They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.
If we must accept fate we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.
Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.
Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places.
I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town whichwas appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.
Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.
Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.
There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us?