A while back I started to take time each week to look for self motivation to keep me looking and moving forward in a positive manner. This week, I picked one to share from one of my favorite early American authors, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882”
As a leading early American author, essayist, lecturer, and poet, Emerson led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century with what I consider one of his best works, an essay entitled “Nature” in 1836. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled “The American Scholar” in 1837, that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. called America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence”. Emerson was a champion of individualism and a critic of the overbearing pressures of society.
Emerson also served as a mentor and friend to fellow Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.