561 Famous Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
5/25/1803 - 4/27/1882
Also Known As:
Waldo Ralph Emerson
Waldo Emerson Ralph
Professions:
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About Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph 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.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the
insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite
blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate
finish, as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of
vegetable beauty.
Architecture
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Essays--Of History
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The hand that rounded Peter's dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
Architecture
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: The Problem
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In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or
say of the Laocoon how it might be made difference? A
masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of
being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
Sculpture
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Society and Solitude--Art
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Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that
intense light will not make it beautiful.
Light
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Nature (ch. III)
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Every day brings a ship,
Every ship brings a word;
Well for those who have no fear,
Looking seaward well assured
That the word the vessel brings
Is the word they wish to hear.
Post
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Letters
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We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
Education
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances -- it was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then, and another day would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Circumstances
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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