Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Birthdate: 25. May 1803
Date of death: 27. April 1882
Other names: Ральф Эмерсон
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, 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 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 and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series , represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "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. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson is one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures," he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man." Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist. Wikipedia
Works
Quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give All to Love, st. 4
1840s, Poems (1847)
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Source: The Complete Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Widely attributed to Emerson on the internet, this actually originates with "What is Success?” http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/emerson/Ephemera/Success.html by Bessie Anderson Stanley in Heart Throbs Volume Two (1911) edited by Joseph Mitchell Chapple.
Misattributed
„Oh, tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire.“
Ode, Concord, July 4, 1857
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Brahma http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=20567&c=323, st. 1.
Composed in July 1856 this poem is derived from a major passage of the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most popular of Hindu scriptures, and portions of it were likely a paraphrase of an existing translation. Though titled "Brahma" its expressions are actually more indicative of the Hindu concept "Brahman"
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)
Variant: If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
The Conservative http://www.rwe.org/the-conservative/ (1842)
Variant: I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
„Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.“
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, book Quatrains
Quatrains, Nature
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)