In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.
Ralph Waldo EmersonThe book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.
Ralph Waldo EmersonFashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.
Ralph Waldo EmersonIt is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
Ralph Waldo EmersonThe soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose ... We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight.
Ralph Waldo Emerson