Just Thinking

"Solitude is impractical, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

JED CLAMPETT: Pearl, what d'ya think? Think I oughta move?

COUSIN PEARL: Jed, how can ya even ask? Look around ya. Yer eight miles from yer nearest neighbor. Yor overrun with skunks, possums, coyotes, bobcats. Ya use kerosene lamps fer light and ya cook on a wood stove summer and winter. Yer drinkin' homemade moonshine and washin' with homemade lye soap. And yor bathroom is fifty feet from the house and you ask "Should I move?"

JED: I reckon yor right. A man'd be a dang fool to leave all this!

-THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know, until he has tried."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

(emphasis mine)