Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.
This statement, along with the cherry tree story, was invented by biographer Parson Weems (Mason Locke Weems). This statement, and the accompanying cherry tree story, didn’t appear in his Washington biography “The Life of Washington” until the fifth edition in 1806.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
