teaming brain

so before i even finish this essay, i have to list some of my favorite quotes from ralph waldo emerson's self reliance before i die.

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
NOthing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."

"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 luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In ever 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. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. "

"NOthing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind... What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?... 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 truth is handsomer than the affectation of love."

" What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better thank you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."


"My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. "