The unknown friend

“ A man must be in sympathy with society about him, or else, not wish to be in in sympathy with it. If neither of these two, he must be wretched. ”

“ Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts & not from the necessity of sale—who writes always to be the unknown friend. ”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson [from his journals, March-April 1848], in EMERSON IN HIS JOURNALS, selected and edited by Joel Porte, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) - London (England), 1982.