Isabel

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“What are men compared to rocks and mountains?”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“The foregoing generations beheld Divinity and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the Universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of Life stream around and through us... The sun shines to-day also!”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson