"To be a man is to be..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.”

“You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his work will characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. If you make a picture or a statue, it sets the beholder in that state of mind you had when you made it. If you spend for show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it will so appear. We are all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and things themselves are detective.”

“For he that feeds men serveth few;He serves all who dares be true.”

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me; not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.”

“The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.”

“As long as I continue to hear 'normal' people telling me I am too childish, I know I'm doing just fine.”

“No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.”

“Absolute passion cannot be understood by a third party.”

“Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things themselves; we are happy from possessing what we like, not from possessing what others like.”