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  ...dealt it its mortal blow.
Yes, we are the cowed,--we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet[66] and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.   They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men, by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald[67] sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus[68] makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the...   Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Source: RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The American Scholar, oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 31, 1837.Nature, Addresses and Lectures , p. 100 . · Excerpt from Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson · This quote is about greatness · Search on Google Books to find all references and sources for this quotation.

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