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
People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.
There is no beautifier of complexion or form of behavior like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.
I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.
I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.
I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste.
The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure.
I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.
I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me.
I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.
Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.
Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.
Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold
I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already.
If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he publishes.