Ralph Waldo Emerson

As the imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man, so also is this joy of musical expression.

The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existance of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.

Power ceases in the instant of repose;  It resides in the moment of transition from past to a new state.

Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itsef.  The genesis and maturation of the planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegitable, are the demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.  Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.  That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.

All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, yet no man improves.

A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think that good days are preparing for you.  Do not beleive it.  Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

You think that it is because I have3 an income which exempts me from your day-labour, that I waste (as you call it) my time in sun-gazing and star-gazing.  You do not know me.  If my debts, as they threaten, should consume what money I have, I should live just as I do now: I should eat worse food, and wear a courser coat, and should wander in a potato patch instead of in the wood - but it is I, not my twelve hundred dollars a year that love God.

It must be that when God speaketh, he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole.
Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, - means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.  All things are made sacred by relation to it,-one as much as another.  All things are disolved to ther center by thier cause.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.  Absolve yourself to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage fo the world.