SELF-RELIANCE

1. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone 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. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us.

1.1. Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

2. We all should be noncomformists.

2.1. But for nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.

3. The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

4. 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 other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them.

5. Let us never bow and apologize more.

6. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?

7. Insist on yourself; never imitate.

8. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

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

10. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

11. Don`t waste your time on things you don`t like. The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.

12. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day.

13. The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage.

14. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.