Self Reliance (Illustrated)
Emerson’s lifelong search, what he called his heart’s inquiry, was “Whence is your power?” His reply was always the same: “From my nonconformity. I never listened to your people’s law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time. I was content with the simple rural poverty of my own. Hence this sweetness.”2
Robert D. Richardson • Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Who is he that shall control me?
Why may not I act & speak & write & think
with entire freedom? What am I to the
Universe, or, the Universe, what
is it to me?
Why may not I act & speak & write & think
with entire freedom? What am I to the
Universe, or, the Universe, what
is it to me?
Emerson: Who is He that Shall Control Me?
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Henry David Thoreau • Walden
But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built.