Happy Birthday, Ralph Waldo Emerson!

[eldritchhobbit]

Happy birthday to Ralph Waldo Emerson (25 May, 1803 – 27 April, 1882)!

"Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Literary Ethics" (1838)

Comments

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

If you ever come to Boston, I'll take you to his grave.

[reynardine.livejournal.com]

Emerson's Essays remain one of my favorite non-fiction books.

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

Oh wow! I'll take you up on that! :D Thanks!

What a fantastic photo.

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

Great stuff. He was such a clear and compelling thinker/writer!

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

Thank you! It's right near Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau. They're all buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

Oh goodness, that is one-stop shopping, historically speaking, isn't it? Absolutely amazing. I must come up one of these days for a literary pilgrimage!!!