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
Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?
Whatever limits us we call fate.
The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we callFate.
Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.
I know and see too well, when not voluntarily blind, the speedy limits opersons called high and worthy.
There is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had.
There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.
The only true gift is a portion of yourself.
Some of your hurts you have cured, / And the sharpest you still have survived, / But what torments of grief you endured / From evils which never arrived!
The artist must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.
The art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.