Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

"Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise."

"All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments."

"But if a man be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."

"Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous."

"Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?"

"The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population."

"The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind."

"A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss."

"The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough"

"In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me"

"There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet."

"Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?"

"The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship"