Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
Ralph Waldo EmersonGreat country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.
Ralph Waldo EmersonGod may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.
Ralph Waldo EmersonBroader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.
Ralph Waldo Emerson