561 Famous Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
5/25/1803 - 4/27/1882
Also Known As:
Waldo Ralph Emerson
Waldo Emerson Ralph
Professions:
Information:
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.
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Cupid is a casuist, a mystic, and a cabalist,--
Can your lurking thought surprise,
And interpret your device,
. . . .
All things wait for and divine him,--
How shall I dare to malign him?
Gods
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Initial Doemonic and Celestial Love (pt. I)
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The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me,
correspondent to my flowing unto him.
Gifts
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Essays--Of Gifts
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Send them into everlasting Coventry.
Punishment
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Essays--Manners, during English Civil War, officers were sent for punishment to the garrison at Conv
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The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions,
inspirations, flashes of genius.
Courage
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Society and Solitude--Courage
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Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit,
and not give the bread of life.
Preaching
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: An Address to the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge
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With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three
thousand miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation
Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist
that there is no such thing as progress.
Progress
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Mayday
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Born for success, he seemed
With grace to win, with heart to hold,
With shining gifts that took all eyes.
Success
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: In Memoriam (l. 60)
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If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and
there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Success
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Of the American Scholar, in "Nature Addresses and Lectures"
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If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or
can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs,
than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his
house, tho it be in the woods. And if a man knows the law,
people will find it out, tho he live in a pine shanty, and resort
to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the
prisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint landscape, and convey
into oils and ochers all the enchantments of spring or autumn; or
can liberate or intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious
songs and verses, 'tis certain that the secret can not be kept:
the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and
tens and fifties to his door.
Success
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Works (vol. VIII), in his "Journal" (1855) p, 528 (ed. 1912)
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The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted
until within this century.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Shakespeare
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Letters and Social Aims--Quotation and Originality
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What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of
religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled?
What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office,
or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered?
What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon?
What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What
lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What
gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?
Shakespeare
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Representative Men--Shakespeare
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The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and
no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited
and gladly entertained by men around him.
Genius
Quotes, by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Source: Race
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