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 man can have society upon his own terms.
When a man meets his make, society begins.
Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.
Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.
Society is a hospital of incurables.
A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession.
Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes.
If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false statement I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? The streetis as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie.
Society cannot do without cultivated men. As soon as the first wants are satisfied, the higher wants become imperative.
The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.
Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts; but, being in its nature conventional, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together.
Society does not love its unmaskers.
It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern.
In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.