Culture...................

"A man is the prisoner of his power."

"Our efficiency depends so much on our concentration, that
Nature usually in the instances where a marked man is sent
into the world, overloads him with bias, sacrificing his
symmetry to his working power."

"But worse than the harping on one string, Nature has
secured individualism, by giving the private person a high
conceit of his weight in the system.  The pest of society is
egotists.  There are dull and bright, sacred and profane,
coarse and fine egotists.  'Tis a disease that, like influenza,
falls on all constitutions."

"Each animal out of its habitat would starve."

"The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer
trained, or, who has visited a menagerie, or the exhibition of
the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education.
'A boy,' says Plato, 'is the most vicious of all wild beasts,' and
in the same spirit, the old English poet Gascoigne says, 'a
boy is better unborn than untaught.'"

"Let us make our education brave and preventive.  Politics
is an after-work, a poor patching.  We are always a little
late.  The evil is done, the law is passed, and we begin the
up-hill agitation for repeal of that of which we ought to
have prevented the enacting.  We shall one day learn to
supersede politics by education.  What we call our root-
and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling,
intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms.  We must
begin higher up, namely, in Education."

"But books are good only as far as the boy is ready for
them.  He sometimes gets ready very slowly.  You send your
child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who
educate him."

"Landor said, 'I have suffered more from my bad
dancing, than from all the misfortunes and miseries of
my life put together.'"

"What is true anywhere is true everywhere.  And let
him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty
or worth as he carries."

"Cities give us collisions.  'Tis said, London and New
York take the nonsense out of a man.  A great part of
our education is sympathetic and social."

"He who aims high, must dread an easy home and
popular manners.  Heaven sometimes hedges a rare
character about with ungainliness and odium, as the
burr that protects the fruit."

-all quotes are excerpted from Ralph Waldo Emerson's
essay, Culture