"There is properly no history, only biography...." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There was never anything that did not proceed from a thought.”

“I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room.”

“Of all wit's uses, the main one is to live well with who has none.”

“What would constitute useful history? That which should teach us our duties and our rights, without appearing to teach them.”

“Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics.”

“American history is not something dead and over. It is always alive,always growing, always unfinished.”

“How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.”

“I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all.”

“But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.”