"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life." -Robert Louis Stevenson

"There is a rude nobility, like that of a barbarian king, in this unshaken confidence in himself and indifference to the wants, thoughts, or sufferings of others. In his whole works I find no trace of pity," wrote Stevenson of Henry David Thoreau in Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Stevenson paints Thoreau as a man of contrasts, a figure who deserves his place in history even if he seems to have stumbled tactlessly into it. "Thus this singularly eccentric and independent mind, wedded to a character of so much strength, singleness, and purity, pursued its own path of self-improvement for more than half a century."