"To
believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private
heart is true for all men, --- that is genius. Speak your latent convictions
and it shall be the universal sense." ~~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Envy
is ignorance. Imitation is suicide." ~~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"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." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Society
is a joint stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing
of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the
eater. The virtue in most request conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It
loves not realities and creators but names and customs." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nothing
is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself
and you shall have the suffrage of the world." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"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 often my
constitution, the only wrong what is against it." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"My
life is for itself and not for a spectacle." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What
I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule,
equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole
distinction between greatness and meanness. 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 love 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." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The
objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it
scatters your force. It loses your times and blurs the impression of your
character." ~~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Do
your work and I shall know you. Do your work and you shall reinforce yourself.
A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"To
be great is to be misunderstood." ~~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little mind, adored by little statesmen
and philosophers and divine." ~~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Speak
what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in
hard words again, thought it contradict everything you said today." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A character is like an acoustic or
Alexandrian stanza; -- read it forward, backward or across it still spells the
same thing." ~~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Greatness
appeals to the future."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Insist
on yourself; never imitate." ~~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"For
everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts and
loses old instincts." ~~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Your
genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions.
Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly and what you have already done
singly will justify you now." ~~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"He
who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good
out of him and elsewhere and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on
his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands
his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger
than a man who stands on his head." ~~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nothing
can bring you peace but yourself." ~~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hope
you enjoyed reading this collection of quotes.
