Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.
Ralph Waldo EmersonNature is a rag-merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations; like a good chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his laboratory, converting his old shirts into pure white sugar.
Ralph Waldo EmersonWhat is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?
Ralph Waldo EmersonIn every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo EmersonUse makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,--familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination; knows practically Marshal Saxe's rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.
Ralph Waldo Emerson