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
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.
Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.
The virtue in most request is conformity.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.
Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself.
He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.
A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.