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Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Age: 78 †
Born: 1803
Born: May 25
Died: 1882
Died: April 27
Biographer
Diarist
Essayist
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Genius
Atlantic
Shall
Luckily
American
Steam
America
Element
Intruding
Mind
Nervous
Strait
National
Narrowed
West
Continental
Elements
Rocky

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Astrology is astronomy brought down to Earth and applied toward the affairs of men.
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Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.
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If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice.
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If the East loves infinity, the West delights in boundaries.
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Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
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Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him.
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My joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation.
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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
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It is with a good book as it is with good company.
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Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.
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Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men.
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For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
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There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.
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The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.
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But hospitality must be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.
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Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might.
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The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.
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A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.
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Only a biker knows why a dog sticks his head out of a car window.
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Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.
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