Quotes from Emerson's Essay on "Self-Reliance"
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"A man should learn to detect
and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within
, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he
dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every
work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back
to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no
more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by
our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when
the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger
will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt
all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion
from another."
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"Trust thyself: every
heart vibrates to that iron string."
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"The virtue most request is
conformity.
Self-reliance is its aversion. It [Conformity] loves not realities
and creators, but names and customs."
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"No law can be sacred to me
but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily
transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution,
the only wrong what is against it."
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"What I must do is all that
concerns me, not what the people think. It is the harder, because you
will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than
you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion;
it is easy in solitude to live after our own. But the great man is he
who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence
of solitude."
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"The other terror that scares
us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or
word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our
orbit than our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them."
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"A foolish consistency is
the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers
and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He
may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you
think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard
words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. --"Ah,
so you shall be sure to be misunderstood."-- Is it so bad, then, to be
misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and
Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise
spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."
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"There will be an agreement
in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their
hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they
seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little
height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best
ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient
distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine
action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions.
Your conformity explains nothing."
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"At times the whole world seems
to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client,
child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door,
and say, "Come out unto us." But keep thy state; come not into their confusion.
The
power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man
can come near me but through my act."
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"If our young men miscarry in
their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails,
men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges,
and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities
or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself
that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of
his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries
all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches,
edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in
successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a
hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and
feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone
his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances."
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"A political victory, a rise
of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend,
or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good
days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you
peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of
principles."
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More about Emerson: http://miso.wwa.com/~jej//1emerson.html#Quotes
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