Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.
Ralph Waldo EmersonThe intellect,-that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams.
Ralph Waldo EmersonThe sermon which I write inquisitive of truth is good a year after, but that which is written because a sermon must be writ is musty the next day.
Ralph Waldo EmersonAll men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.
Ralph Waldo Emerson