To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent con… - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

In happy hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected, — the work of genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in a world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority