Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Self Reliance
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Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.
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Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
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Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
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Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
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The secret of fortune is joy in our hands.
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God will not have his work made manifest by cowards
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It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.
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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. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future.
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I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
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No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.
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Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
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When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name; the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience.
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I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. 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.
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Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
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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.
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A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.
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An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
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He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.
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The only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.
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Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
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Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues.
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The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
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He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
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Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
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We love it because it is self dependent, self derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
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You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.
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Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.
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To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.
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Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
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All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.
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