"There are dull and bright, sacred and..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.”

“There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.”

“Circumstance does not make the man. Circumstance reveals man to himself.”

“Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.”

“Self-confidence may be mistaken for egotism if it is not accompanied by humility of the heart.”

“Without love, benevolence becomes egotism.”

“[If a book were] very innocent, and one which might be confided to the reason of any man; not likely to be much read if let alone, but if persecuted, it will be generally read. Every man in the United States will think it a duty to buy a copy, in vindication of his right to buy and to read what he pleases.”

“It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.”

“Money doesn't change men, it merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greedy, the money brings that out, that's all.”