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
Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it.
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.
Life is in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid rallies. A man is spent by his work, starved, prostrate; he will not lift his hand to save his life; he can never think more. He sinks into deep sleep and wakes with renewed youth, with hope, courage, fertile in resources, and keen for daring adventure.
I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped.
What is indispensable to inspiration? ...sound sleep and the provocation of a good book or a companion.
If you act, you show character; if you sit still, you show it; if you sleep you show it.
The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.
The dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living.
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.
The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes.
Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed.