Essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson

May 25, 1803, Boston, Massachusetts, United States

April 27, 1882, Concord, Massachusetts, United States

• "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."
• "To be great is to be misunderstood."
• "Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air."

• "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door"

May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American lecturer, poet, and essayist, the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism.

“Address at Divinity College”, “English Traits”, “Essays”, “Nature”, “Poems”, “Representative Men”, “Self-Reliance”, “The American Scholar”, “The Conduct of Life”

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.

Waldo Emerson is truly the center of the American transcendental movement, setting out most of its ideas and values in a little book, Nature, published in 1836, that represented at least ten years of intense study in philosophy, religion, and literature. His philosophical ideas also include self-reliance, transparent eyeball, double consciousness, stream of thought, over-soul, etc.

Emerson was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. As a lecturer and orator, Emerson became the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States. His work not only influenced his contemporaries, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”