A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.