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
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.
The religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them.
The religions we call false were once true.
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen but society has chosen for us.
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. . . . Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth.
The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature.
Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.
The multitude of false churches accredits the true religion.
Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line, Severing rightly his from thine, Which is human, which divine.
The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.
Europe has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true.
Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend towhat addresses the senses.