Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems

I discovered Emerson at age 34, and it was like coming home. I have always been, I guess, a natural "transcendentalist". In other words, I instinctively and intuitively fell into a transcendentalist mindset and way of thinking without ever having read any. So I've read Thoreau and Annie Dillard and frankly can't stand either of them. I find them a little strained. Emerson, to me at least, is a different story. He writes like a god. He writes with authority, poetry and insight. He, to me, is worlds apart from someone like Dillard...hard to say exactly how. I just know that his writing is brilliant, brilliant...free, courageous, honest. A big part of it for me is his passionate and deep understanding of God coupled with his rejection of "corpse-cold" religion. If you are a seeker, if you have an open mind, you will find few better than this.

Emerson affirms the individual and self-reliant aspects of life. Early in life, Emerson lost his father and 3 year old sister Mary Caroline. The author demonstrated the power of expression in translating truth to both verse and music. Some famous quotes from the book are as follows: - The perfect friendship requires a rare nature.. - The fountains of my hidden life are through thy friendship fair. - Man (person ) is all symmetry. - Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. i.e. Plato had no biography per se. A strength of this work is that the author presents classic sayings/quotations of Emerson in the original literary mode. It will be appreciated by literature enthusiasts everywhere.

histories, biographies, criticism, singular people like woodmen are the heroes through the ages; a booh making us stronger.