We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can. — Essays (Emerson)

"The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one."

"I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them."

"My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one."

"Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great."

"We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy. As a political power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected"

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual & in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the worlds opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."