God offers to every mind a choice between repose and truth. take which you please — you can never have both. [Essay on Intellect] - Ralph Waldo Emerson

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Tomorrow, a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time.

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.