I just read "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson for the first time....

....and simply had to share portions of it with you. I feel like my own commentary would only water it down, so I'll just paste what I just transcribed into my journal below:

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards….

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness….Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind….

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in 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 than you know it. It is easy in the world to lie 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….

I suppose no man can violate his nature….A character is like an acrostic of Alexandrian stanza; -- read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing….We pass for what we are….Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment….

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim….

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls….A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.