Ralph Waldo Emerson

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

Go alone; refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.