Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.
speech graduation authenticity
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard Divinity School Address 1838, 1838
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.
speech graduation philosophy
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard Divinity School Address 1838, 1838
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.
speech graduation independence
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard Divinity School Address 1838, 1838