Date: August 31, 1837

The world's "attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: August 31, 1837

"A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: August 31, 1837

"And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, -- this he shall hear and promulgate."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: August 31, 1837

"The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: August 31, 1837

"For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, — darker than can be enlightened."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: 1845

"Mr. Gore lived in St. Michael's, Talbot county, Maryland, when I left there; and if he is still alive, he very probably lives there now; and if so, he is now, as he was then, as highly esteemed and as much respected as though his guilty soul had not been stained with his brother's blood."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1854

"Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1854

"What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many tho...

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1854

"While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?"

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: October 10, 1869

"Recitations alone readily degenerate into dusty repetitions, and lectures alone are too often a useless expenditure of force. The lecturer pumps laboriously into sieves. The water may be wholesome, but it runs through."

— Eliot, Charles William (1834-1926)