Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literary Birthday – 25 May – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on 25 May 1803 and died on 27 April 1882.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

  1. The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
  2. A man is what he thinks about all day long.
  3. Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
  4. Imagination is not a talent of some men, but is the health of every man.
  5. Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
  6. Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
  7. Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
  8. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
  9. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
  10. Art is a jealous mistress.
  11. If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
  12. Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
  13. I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
  14. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
  15. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He gave direction to a religious, philosophical, and ethical movement that above all stressed belief in the spiritual potential of every person. His books include Nature, The American Scholar, and Divinity School Address. Emerson’s work not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present. His essays concentrated on moral individualism, self-reliance, and the need for self-expression. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1864. In 1867, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.

Source for Image: Josiah Johnson Hawes, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ralph_Waldo_Emerson_by_Josiah_Johnson_Hawes_1857.jpg


by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 25th May 2013
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0 thoughts on “Literary Birthday – 25 May – Ralph Waldo Emerson”

  1. Irfan butt

    A great service in the cause of transfer of human knowledge from one generation to another,particularly in a world of excessive knowledge .