This Inward Center...

The religion, the ethics of a restricted life, the life of a shepherd or of a peasant has infinite value in its concentrated intensity and in its limitation to a few and very simple aspects of life. It has the same value as the religiosity and the ethics of someone of highly developed knowledge and of an existence rich in extent and activity. This inward center, this simple sphere of the right of subjective freedom--the source of will, decision and action, the abstract content of his conscience, that wherein guilt and value of the individual, his everlasting court, are comprised--remains untouched by the loud noise of world history.

~ Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. C. J. and P. W. Friedrich