Self-Reliance

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.