Self Reliance

Quotes

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 conviction, and it shall be the universal sense

Moses, plato and milton 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. 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.

Interpretation: every work of genius reminds us of ideas that we may have had in the past but dismissed.

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 to-morrow 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.

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 him to till.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think . . . the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Main points:

From CliffsNotes 😅.

• Emerson promotes and values individual experience over the knowledge gained from books.
• The person who scorns personal intuition and, instead, chooses to rely on others’ opinions lacks the creative power necessary for robust, bold individualism.
• To rely on others’ judgments is cowardly, without inspiration or hope. A person with self-esteem, on the other hand, exhibits originality and is childlike — unspoiled by selfish needs — yet mature.
• Children provide models of self-reliant behavior because they are too young to be cynical, hesitant, or hypocritical
• It is better to live truly and obscurely than to have one’s goodness extolled in public. It makes no difference to him whether his actions are praised or ignored
• Acquiescing to public opinion wastes a person’s life. Those around you never get to know your real personality.
• Emerson notes two enemies of the independent thinker: society’s disapproval or scorn, and the individual’s own sense of consistency. Consistency becomes a major theme in the discussion as he shows how it restrains independence and growth.
• Why people hold onto old beliefs or positions merely because they have taken these positions in the past.
• “A true man,” Emerson’s label for the ideal individual, “belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of all things. Where he is, there is nature.”