SELF-RELIANCE -- 1

The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may.

The sentiment they instill 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.

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, 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 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.

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

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that

1.      Envy is ignorance;

2.      That imitation is suicide;

3.      That he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;

4.      That though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

        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.

        Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.

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.

1.      Great men have always done so, and

2.      confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,

3.      betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart,

4.      working through their hands,

5.      predominating in all their being.

And we are now men, 

Must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; 

Not minors and invalids in a protected corner,

Not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers,

Benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, 

made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by,

if it will stand by itself.

Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me.

Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic.

It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.

Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature.

A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse;

independent,

irresponsible,

looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by,

he tries and sentences them on their merits,

in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome.

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.

As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person,

watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds,

whose affections must now enter into his account.

There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!

Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable.

He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary,

would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear.

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.

Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

Self-reliance is its aversion.

It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.

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

Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church.

On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?

my friend suggested, "But these impulses may be from below, not from above."

I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil."

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.

 A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right.

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?

If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbados,

Why should I not say to him?????????,

'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.'

Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines.

I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.

I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.

Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations.

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