"We do not live an equal life,..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.”

“The best political economy is the care and culture of men; for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their talent to new labor.”

“If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.”

“The strenuous life tastes better”

“In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.”

“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.”

“Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.”

“Everything that is fear cannot be love, and everything that is love cannot be fear.”

“I am part of the part that once was everything, Part of the darkness which gave birth to light… Mephistopheles, from Faust.”