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Here's the archive item for
03_12:
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Self Reliance
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. . . 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.
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. The power
which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is
which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
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