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
I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hopethat it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.
In England every man you meet is some man's son; in America, he may be some man's father.
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.
Cannot we let [children] be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough.
We stand against fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to a man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds it new and bigger.
He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.
I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.
How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?
Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?
Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.
[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.
What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.
The Oversoul is before Time, and Time, Father of all else, is one of his children.
The Sky is the daily bread of the imagination