Ralph Waldo Emerson

Selected Passages from Self Reliance

The highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought.


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.


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.


Envy is ignorance; Imitation is suicide.


Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place that divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age.


Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.


Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.


Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.


What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.


I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects me more than is right.


I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.


Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.


Your goodness must have some edge to it,--else it is none.


Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily nonappearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.


It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.


But do your work, and I shall know you.


A man must consider what a blindman's-bluff is this game of conformity.


For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must learn how to estimate a sour face; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, and are put on and off as the wind blows and as a newspaper directs.