Self Reliance

To believe your one thought, to believe what is true for you in your own private heart is true

for all men–that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the Universal sense:

for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by

the trumpets of the Last Judgement…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.

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 to 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.

Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and

another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without pre-established harmony. The eye

was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but halfexpress

ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be

safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not

have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart

into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no

peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse

befriends; no invention, no hope.

Trust thyself:

every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the Divine Providence has found for

you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done

so, and confided themselves child-like to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that

the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands,

predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the

same trancendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards

fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort

and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson