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
Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow
Wisdom will never let us stand with any man on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy or intimacy to come. But whence and when: Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.
Let us be poised, wise and our own today.
We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.
We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future, but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.
Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.
Today is a king in disguise.
The sun shines today also.
Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.
Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.
I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.
The Sky is the daily bread of the imagination
The times are the masquerade of the eternities