Summary
In his landmark essay Self-Reliance, Emerson delivered one of his most famous challenges to conformity:
· “Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and every pure and wise spirit ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
· “Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
· “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 in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
· “The great man is he who, amid the crowd, keeps the independence of solitude with perfect sweetness.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
· It’s not the Destination; it’s the journey.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
· “A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance Note: to young people, gay used to mean happy
· “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 given to him to till.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
· “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 given to him to till.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance