What is God?, said the disciples, and Plato replied, “It is hard to learn and impossible to divulge.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson; from Blotting Book No. XVII

The best part of truth is certainly that which hovers in gleams and suggestions unpossessed before man. His recorded knowledge is dead and cold. But this chorus of thoughts and hopes, these dawning truths, like great stars just lifting themselves into his horizon, they are his future, and console him for the ridiculous brevity and meanness of his civic life.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson; from Blotting Book No. XII