The following snippets are some of my favorite takeaways from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, Self Reliance.
They can be found here, along with my favorite passages from other books and essays that I’ve recently read: http://brandonbartneck.com/favorite-book-takeaways/.
From Self Reliance…
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. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost.”
“…the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than 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.”
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;”
“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
“A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.“
“Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to bee put by, if it will stand by itself.”
“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind”
“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.”
“Your goodness must have some edge to it, – else it is none.”
“My life is for itself and not a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.”
“…the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.“
“For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face.
“The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.”
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
“To be great is to be misunderstood’
“Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day.”
“We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.”
“The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.”
(After speaking about the danger of relying on past wisdom, and how that keeps us from living in the present) “This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, – painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and are willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly.”
(After speaking about the anecdotal man who is willing to try various enterprises without fear of failure or of having an unconventional path) ” He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”
“…prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness.”
“The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home…I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things…He carries ruins to ruins.”
“That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare?” Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man in unique”
“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other