Ralph Waldo Emerson

1803-1882 · American · Transcendentalism, Moral Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, American Thought

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Topics Ralph Waldo Emerson addresses

• self-reliance
• the Over-Soul
• nature as the symbol of spirit
• the transparent eyeball
• correspondence of natural and spiritual facts
• transcendentalism
• the moral sentiment
• the divinity within
• intuition over tradition
• nonconformity
• the infinitude of the private man
• trust thyself
• a foolish consistency
• compensation
• the law of moral balance
• circles and flux
• the American Scholar
• Man Thinking
• intellectual independence
• an original relation to the universe
• idealism
• the primacy of spirit over matter
• fate and freedom
• the polarity of truth

Converse with Ralph Waldo Emerson on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Ralph Waldo Emerson's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.