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
Ideas must work through the brains and arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams
This time,like all times, is a good time, if we but know what to do with it.
This time is a very good one if we but know what to do with it
Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.
Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship,like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.
The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
In good writing, words become one with things.
I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent - for every effect a perfect cause - and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.