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
Truth is too simple for us: we do not like those who unmask our illusions.
The most dangerous thing is illusion.
Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer.
But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand.
There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.
What is well done, I feel as if I did; what is ill-done, I reck not of.
Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm.
Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.
It is dainty to be sick if you have leisure and convenience for it.
We wake from one dream into another dream.
One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive one.
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
The Sky is the daily bread of the imagination
The times are the masquerade of the eternities