Representative Men, Seven lectures

Plato New Readings; Swedenborg or the Mystic; Montaigne or the Skeptic; Shakespeare or the Poet; Napoleon or the Man of the World; and Goethe or the Writer. According to Wikipedia: "Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) was an American essayist, philosopher, poet, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the early 19th century. His teachings directly influenced the growing New Thought movement of the mid 1800s. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. As a result of this ground breaking work he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence". Emerson once said "Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you."