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 Sky is the daily bread of the imagination
That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our life and character.
The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,--familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination; knows practically Marshal Saxe's rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.
Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.
Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality.
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
Imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.
There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law.
The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
There are no days in life that are so memorable as those that vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.
Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.
Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.