Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.
I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.