Self Reliance, Nature, The Transcendentalist (+Bonus Content) [ILLUSTRATED] Quotes

“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.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance, Nature, The Transcendentalist (+Bonus Content) [ILLUSTRATED]

“If you are noble, I will love
you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions.

If you are true,
but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this
not selfishly, but humbly and truly.

It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance, Nature, The Transcendentalist (+Bonus Content) [ILLUSTRATED]