Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Annotations, 1820-1872. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, vol. 6, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911, p. 412.
Jefferson was not anti-Christian as some accuse him. He was a great admirer of Jesus’ life and philosophy. He did object to the non-ethical aspects of Christianity, miracles, dogma, organized churches. See {611664}. Jefferson even went so far as to write his own version of the Bible—New Testament sometimes called the “Jefferson Bible”—where he translated the material and then extracted the ethical principles leaving out everything else.
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.
