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
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
A mind might ponder its thought for an epoch, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day.
We are wiser than we know.
Always do what you are afraid to do.
The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There's revenge for this humanity.What manner of man does science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is.
I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses.
Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.
Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma.
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.
The education of the will is the object of our existence.