Self Relience

Trust ThySelf:

* 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

* Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing

* 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.

* 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. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. (Trust who and what you are)

* No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.

* What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think

* It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than 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. (Peer Pressure)

* 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 loath to disappoint them.

* But perception is not whimsical, but fatal

* Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say `I think,' `I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. (Given up on self)

* Insist on yourself; never imitate

Except yourself:

* There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; 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.

* Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet.

Working Hard

* A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

* As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect

Being young - Everything revoves around the 'babe' baby makes everyone conform - same as teenagers

* 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 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.

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Society: Conform VS self-reliance prefers conformity

* 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

* . I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions -(Give more respect to them than to ourselves)

* Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom,

* Travelling is a fool's paradise (Other ppls ideas)

Risk being no conformist:

* Whoso would be a