Ten percent of people can think, another ten percent of people think that they think, and eighty percent of people would rather die than be made to think.
Ralph Waldo EmersonThe best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.
Ralph Waldo Emerson...in the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in the streets or villages...in the woods we return to reason and faith.
Ralph Waldo EmersonWe are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?
Ralph Waldo EmersonI am primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence andgood will at the heart of all things, and even higher and yet higher leadings. These are my engagements; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do to men?
Ralph Waldo Emerson