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 child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.
I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose...
The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one's main purpose to serve a job here and there.
The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought
Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see - not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.
Circumstance does not make the man. Circumstance reveals man to himself.
Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the intimated purpose, express character.
Luck is just another word for tenacity of purpose.
There is really no insurmountable barrier save your own inherent weakness of purpose.
The Sky is the daily bread of the imagination
The times are the masquerade of the eternities
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful
Things have their laws as well as men; things refuse to be trifled with.
The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that man are convertible.