quote · Words worth keeping
To the Woods:—Whoso goeth in your paths readeth the same cheerful lesson, whether he be a young child or a hundred years old, comes he in good fortune or in bad, ye say the same things, and from age to age. Ever the needles of the pine grow and fall, the acorns on the oak, the maples redden in autumn and at all times of the year the ground pine and the pyrola bud and root under foot. What is called fortune and what is called time by men, ye know them not. Men have not language to describe one moment of your life.
To the Woods:—Whoso goeth in your paths readeth the same cheerful lesson, whether he be a young child or a hundred years old, comes he in good fortune or in bad, ye say the same things, and from age to age. Ever the needles of the pine grow and fall, the acorns on the oak, the maples redden in autumn and at all times of the year the ground pine and the pyrola bud and root under foot. What is called fortune and what is called time by men, ye know them not. Men have not language to describe one moment of your life.
Approximate author period: c. 1842 AD · industrial
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- Author or tradition
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1842 AD · industrial
author lifetime midpoint (1803–1882)
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- The Optimist’s Good Morning (1911) (1911 AD)
Complete signed selection 140; printed byline: Ralph Waldo Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911; printed copyright 1907
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The voice behind the words.
Listed in the author section of Bartlett’s ninth-edition anthology, in the linked 1905 printing. Dates reflect that historical edition and may differ from modern scholarship.
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