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
Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.
There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.
It is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.
Pain is superficial, and therefore fear is. The torments of martyrdoms are probably most keenly felt by the by-standers.
But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand.
Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.
All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt.
Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature.
I appeal now to the convictions of the communicants, and ask such persons whether they have not been occasionally conscious of a painful confusion of thought between the worship due to God and the commemoration due to Christ.
What opium is instilled into all disaster? It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction,but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought.
There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
Teach the children! It is painting in fresco.
There the great Planter plants Of fruitful worlds the grain, And with a million spells enchants The souls that walk in pain.