The Land According to Emerson

Field on a Sunny Day

The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to be physic and food for our mind, as well as our body. The land, with its tranquilizing sanative influences is to repair the errors of a scholastic and traditional education, and bring us into just relations with men and things. The habit of living in the presence of these invitations of natural wealth is not inoperative, and this habit, combined with the moral sentiment which, in the recent years, has interrogated every institution, usage, and law, has naturally, given a strong direction to the wishes and aims of active young men to withdraw from the cities and cultivate the soil.

   —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Real Freedom According to David Foster Wallace

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

From his commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005.

The whole speech is well worth your time.