"Behind the Curtain" Book #3: Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
A short essay which teaches you how to behave. Includes some of my all-time favorite phrases, which I'll include below.
A short essay which teaches you how to behave. Includes some of my all-time favorite phrases, which I'll include below.
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.
Imitation moves one from an inner to an outer compass
Imitation moves one from an inner to an outer compass
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.
The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great one is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.
Man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.
More than anything this essay reminds me that the greatest joy, and the most interesting competitive advantages, lie along unmarked paths.
Emerson is among the best I've read at describing the mindset required to find one's way.
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Emerson is among the best I've read at describing the mindset required to find one's way.
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