By Ralph Waldo Emerson • American Transcendentalism & Individualism
Emerson's essays on Self-Reliance, Nature, Compensation, and Friendship call upon every individual to trust their inner genius over social conformity.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
“He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”
“Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.”
“I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.”
“Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”
“The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.”
“The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.”
“I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.”
“Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.”
“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”
“Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.”
“A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.”
“Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.”
“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.”
“We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.”
“To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.”
“When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.”
“The cup of life is not so shallow That we have drained the best That all the wine at once we swallow And lees make all the rest.”
“There is a freemasonry among the dull by which they recognize and are sociable with the dull, as surely as a correspondent tact in men of genius.”
“A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.”
“Everything intercepts us from ourselves.”
“No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.”
“We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”
“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”