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.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist....
nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
There is a time in every mans' 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;.......
I much prefer that it (life) should be of a lower strain,
so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.
What must I do is all that concerns me,
not what the people think.
But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd
keeps with perfect sweetness
the independence of solitude.
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.
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.
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
Perception is not whimsical, but fatal.
If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.
If you cannot, I will seek to deserve that you should.
That which each can do best,
none but his Maker can teach him.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
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