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
Power obeys reality, and not appearances; power is according to quality, and not quantity.
We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.
Artists must be sacrificed to their art.
Coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities.
Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.
There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world.
Perhaps it is the lowest of the qualities of an orator, but it is, on so many occasions, of chief importance,--a certain robust and radiant physical health; or--shall I say?--great volumes of animal heat.
The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself.
But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art.
No nation has produced anything like his equal. There is no quality in the human mind, there is no class of topics, there is no region of thought, in which he has not soared or descended, and none in which he has not said the commanding word.
This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life depends upon one's actions.
The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.
Everything runs to excess; every good quality is noxious if unmixed.