Ralph Waldo Emerson on Conformity

“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.”

“These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. … Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. … The virtue in most request is conformity. … Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist... must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.”

“Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.”