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
The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy.
Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.
The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even.
I like to have a person's knowledge comprehend more than one class of topics, one row of shelves. I like a person who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.
It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.
I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.
As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.
A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.
Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.
We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.
Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.
Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.