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
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could? someblunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can.Tomorrow is a new day, begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to beencumbered with your old nonsense.
Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.
The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.
Everything in our world, even a drop of dew, is a microcosm of the universe.
People only see what they are prepared to see.
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry.
The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.
...as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.
Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust in another mouth.
There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity i am bought and sold; for them i will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; - though i confess with shame i sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by i shall have the manhood to withhold.