Self-Reliance

© 2011 by Do You Zoom, Inc.

The Domino Project

Published by Do You Zoom, Inc.

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803—1882

Self-Reliance / Ralph Waldo Emerson

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-936719-10-5
 Self-Reliance

 RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I reread Self-Reliance a few times a year. It’s always on my bedside table and I’ve done it for many
years. Emerson’s clear and true words ring like a bell. It keeps me on track. It’s hard to follow your
path or even to know what it is. There are constant distractions. This essay is a guide for how to
realize your vision for your life. Amazing that he wrote it for us over a hundred years ago.

Jesse Dylan
February 15, 2011



Real movement isn’t pretending. Real movement doesn’t try to tell a story. It doesn’t merely indicate. It is
not about anything, separate from itself. It is a verb; it does; it acts. It does not refer to another idea, or a
historic time other than right now, the present tense, this moment that will soon be over.


My adventure in life began with action and I know it will end with action. Still, I wanted to fly. I
considered flying and its pursuit a reasonable goal, I still do. The failure to investigate or even attempt
human flight is at the heart of the artificiality of the dance field.

Elizabeth Streb
March 20, 2011



What constitutes reasonable belief? The older I get, the more I think that a belief deeply held is a closing
in the mind. And yet, is there any behavior free of belief? Emerson asks us to believe in ourselves. Yet
given the delusions that we all have about our own identity and motivations, it is difficult to assume that
we are always right. This seems especially true because our recently developed brains are more deeply
responsive to the ancient part of our brain than vice versa. This suggests that our old brains powerfully
influence our new brains, but the new parts of our brain have yet to develop the mechanism for
moderating the old parts.

Milton Glaser
February 18, 2011

 CONTENTS

BEGIN READING

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE DOMINO PROJECT

ABOUT THE COVER

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.
The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they
instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. 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. In every work of genius we recognize our
own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no
more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-
humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a
stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we
shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.



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In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected

thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated
majesty.

One of the most insidious forms that Resistance takes in the world of a writer is this: we’ll think a thought and then dismiss it as too crazy, too
extreme, too apart-from-the-norm or the expected. So we don’t write it, we don’t say it, we don’t even think it. Then a week later we’ll hear
someone else articulate that very thought and, in his voice, it will ring so true that we can’t help but feel shame that we disowned it. Self-
censorship is not just self-betrayal and self-abandonment (which would be bad enough), but soul-betrayal and betrayal of our Muse, out inner
voice, our highest self. Hats off to Emerson. He was “American” in the absolute best sense of the word: bold, fresh-thinking, trusting himself
and following his own star. What a guy!

Steve Pressfield

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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. Not for nothing one
face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the
memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it
might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea
which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be
faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. 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.



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There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at

the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide

I remember – in exacting detail – the precise moment when I reached this point in my education (it’s coincidental that it actually took place in
a classroom). After that moment I became a completely different person, confident in myself and my actions, more willing to accept the
downs as well as the ups that I encountered throughout the day, and far more certain that the thoughts I was thinking were important. “That
teacher at the front of the room knows a lot of things,” I thought, “but he doesn’t know what I know, and that’s my value.”

Colin Wright

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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. And
we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and
invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and
benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.



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Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

If you think you can do it, or you think you can’t do it, you are right.

Henry Ford

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What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even
brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the
strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet
unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. 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.

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught
to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the
playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he
tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting,
silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an
independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were,
clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a
committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter
into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus
avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable,
unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which
being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the
world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.



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These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow
faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society
everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one
of its members.

My favorite movie of all times is The Matrix. I like the movie not only for the amazing special effects and action scenes, but for it’s insight in
human condition. I believe we live in the Matrix. I believe the Matrix is very real. We may not be the unconscious batteries living in the
delusion of the programs created by the machines, but we live in the delusion of the rules and belief systems created by our parents,
teachers, colleagues, bosses, and society designed to control us. It’s a delusion because we’re not living the life according to our true self.
We’re not listening to our inner voices because we’re taught our own voices are wrong and inappropriate. So we live the life of others, a
program created by others, because of the fear of being wrong and outcast.

My mission in life is to listen to my own voice as much as possible and follow my instincts. Whenever I do this, I always feel good about myself
eventually and I get the glimpse of the freedom of being outside the Matrix. It’s a hard thing to do, but it’s worth it every time. I never lose
when I trust myself.

Ji Lee

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Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each
shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be
hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the
integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I
remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont
to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the
sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, “But these impulses may be
from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I
will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.



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Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Is non-conformity required for everyone? Probably not. But to be courageous—to be “a man” as Emerson put it in a time of different language
—you must first be willing to think for yourself. And as Martin Luther King, Jr. (another inspiring non-conformist) said years later, “Nothing
pains some people more than having to think.” If you can think for yourself and put those thoughts into meaningful action that improves the
state of the world, you’re well on the way to a courageous, remarkable life.

Chris Guillebeau

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Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my
constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition,
as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to
badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual
affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all
ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this
bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to
him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never
varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles
off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’



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Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that
or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only
wrong what is against it.

Follow your heart. Your heart knows what’s right for you – and what’s wrong for you. First, you must know yourself in all your parts; look into
your own darkness as well as into your own light. Love all that you are. Trust yourself. Then follow your heart wherever it may lead.

Kyeli Smith

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Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your
goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the
counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and
brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim. I hope it is
somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show
cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my
obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist,
that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do
not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I
will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools;
the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the
thousandfold Relief Societies; though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is
a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.



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truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness

must have some edge to it, else it is none.

Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa coined the phrase “idiot compassion,” to explain that thing we do when we react to others from
the Playbook of Nice rather than from an authentic arising of goodness, because our heart is simply open. An open heart is never certain, it is
in open dialog with this world and thus can respond with sweetness when sweetness is due, or wrath or silence or dismissal or an endless
embrace. Because it is genuine, it is sharp. You are on the razor’s edge, meaning right here, right now, playing for keeps, not for
appearances.

Susan Piver

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Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues.
Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in
expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their
living in the world, as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish
to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower
strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and
sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this
appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear
those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic
right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the
assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

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 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.



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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 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.

I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself.

Michel de Montaigne

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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. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead
Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base
housekeepers, under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course,
so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work,
and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman’s-bluff is this game of conformity.
If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the
expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say
a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the
institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one
side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs
of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another
handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity
makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every
truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they
say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip
us in the prison uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and
acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.



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do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you
shall reinforce yourself.

We look for ourselves in many places—meditation retreats, personality assessments, Twitter rankings. But the best place to find the reason
why we were put on earth is a private moment immersed in our craft. In that sacred instant, we see without a reasonable doubt that we were
made to create, and contribute.

Pamela Slim

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There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general
history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not
feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved,
but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most
disagreeable sensation.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to
estimate a sour face. The bystanders look askance on him in the public street or in the friend’s parlour. If
this aversion had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad
countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put
on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more
formidable than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world
to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being
very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when
the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society
is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of
no concernment.



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For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.

I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.

George S. Patton

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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 why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest
you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in
acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a
new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of
the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave
your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has
simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think
now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict
every thing you said today. ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’



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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by

little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With
consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as
well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.

If the wind will not serve, take to the oars.

Latin Proverb

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Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and
Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To
be great is to be misunderstood.



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Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was

misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise
spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Mark Zuckerberg was misunderstood when he introduced the newsfeed and turned down a billion dollars. Steve Jobs was misunderstood, and
Cory Booker, and Richard Branson, and David Simon, and Kanye West. If you’re not being misunderstood, then you’re not shattering the
status quo.

Michael Karnjanaprakorn

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I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as
the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter
how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward,
backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows
me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it
will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines and
resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he
carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. 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.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their
hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost
sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the
best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens
itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine
actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify
you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough today to do right, and scorn eyes, I must
have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn
appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue
work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills
the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united
light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws
thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignity into Washington’s port, and America into Adams’s eye. Honor is
venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is
not of today. We love it and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-
dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.



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

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition
inspired and success achieved.

Helen Keller

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I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and
ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us
never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I
wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I
would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the
times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that
there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to
no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you, and all
men, and all events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other
person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must
be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an
age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; and posterity seem to
follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire.
Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue
and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the
Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of
Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called “the height of Rome”; and all history resolves itself very easily into the
biography of a few stout and earnest persons.



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A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman

Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and
cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the
possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of
one man;…all history resolves itself very easily into the
biography of a few stout and earnest persons.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Thomas Edison

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Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and
down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the
man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or
sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book
have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’
Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take
possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to
praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s
house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious
ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it
symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up,
exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.



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

You can’t get spoiled if you do your own ironing.

Meryl Streep

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Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and
lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and
common day’s work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all
this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out
virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act today, as followed their public and renowned steps.
When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to
those of gentlemen.



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When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will
be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

If an American is to amount to anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must take pride in his own work, instead of
sitting idle to envy the luck of others. He must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can, and accept defeat if he must, without
seeking to place on his fellow man a responsibility which is not theirs.

Theodore Roosevelt

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The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been
taught by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with
which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by a
law of his own, make his own scale of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money
but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely
signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who
is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the
nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots
a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry
leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or
Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep
force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For, the sense of
being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space,
from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence
their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as
appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of
thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied
without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its
truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of
ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul
that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man
discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to
his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that
these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions and acquisitions are but
roving; the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless
people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for,
they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing.
But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of
time, all mankind, although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as
much a fact as the sun.



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We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us

receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.

God loves to help him who strives to help himself.

Aeschylus

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The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It
must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the
world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought;
and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old
things pass away, means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the
present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, one as much as another. All things are dissolved
to their centre by their cause, and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If,
therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some
old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the
oak which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his
ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity
and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is
light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any
thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.



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Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old

things pass away, means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives
now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation,
there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself,
then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues
from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have
dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it
now.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some
saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window
make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.
There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a
leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is
no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or
remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the
riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he
too lives with nature in the present, above time.



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Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares

not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.

Judy Garland

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This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak
the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on
a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors,
and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, painfully recollecting the
exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered
these sayings, they understand them, and are willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use
words as good when occasion comes.

If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be
weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as
old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the
rustle of the corn.



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If we live truly, we shall see truly.

We grow up carrying and repeating other’s thoughts and beliefs: our own voices are used to give opinions we have heard but never stopped
to examine. But when we do pause and think, we may find we are imposters, actors, sheep in wolves’ clothing. That underneath the bluster,
posturing, and the often casual dismissal of others who happen not to be as privileged as we are, we are in fact decent people who can extend
ourselves, avoid discrimination, decry exploitation in all its forms, and practice and teach the value of compassion and benevolence. Once we
start living by the Golden Rule, we live truly, see truly.

Ingrid Newkirk

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And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains un-said; probably cannot be said; for all that we
say is the far-off remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to say it,
is this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way;
you shall not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any
name; the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and
experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its forgotten
ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision,
there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds
identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with
knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea, long intervals of
time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every former state of life
and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is called death.

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 a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the
world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all
reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why,
then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but
agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it
works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round
him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We
do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to
principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who
are not.



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Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should

not raise his finger.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. The desire and ability to press on has and always will solve the problems of the human
race and divide those who achieve from those who might have been.

Jeffrey Fry

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This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the
ever-blessed one. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of
good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they
contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and
engage my respect as examples of its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature
for conservation and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to
remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and
orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and
vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.



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Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which

cannot help itself.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the
intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the
invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our
docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home,
to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns
of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any
preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or
sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child,
because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I
have all men’s. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it.
But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole
world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness,
fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, ‘Come out unto us.’ But keep thy state;
come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No
man can come near me but through my act. “What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave
ourselves of the love.”

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let
us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts.
This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying
affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we
converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after
appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no
law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavour to nourish my
parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, but these relations I must fill after a
new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any
longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still
seek to deserve that you should.



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I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or

you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

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I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before
the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. 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. Does
this sound harsh today? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we
follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot
sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason,
when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me, and do the same thing.



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I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what

is deep is holy.

What you love to think about, dream about, speak about, learn about and create about is your genius. Don’t water down your natural style or
contort yourself into some idealized version of who you think you should be. The impulses that come from deep within are your guide track to
greatness. We want you as is.

Marie Forleo

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The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere
antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of
consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You
may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider whether
you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of
these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have my
own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But
if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one imagines that this
law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has
ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may
in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron
necessity is to others!



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truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the
common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust
himself for a taskmaster.

First in public school, then in the job culture, we learn to follow the rules and to do as we’re told. Obedience and conformity, sad to say, are
the common motives of humanity today. Trusting yourself to cast those motives off and follow your own path requires a leap of faith — but it
is only down your own path that you will find your heart.

Pace Smith

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If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of
these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding
whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age
yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state,
but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all
proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is
mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has
chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men
say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within
one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself
that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New
Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a
school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years,
and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his
days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.
He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they
are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new
powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he
should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the
books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, and that
teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men;
in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their
property; in their speculative views.



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It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a

revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their
religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of
living; their association; in their property; in their speculative
views.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

Leo Tolstoy

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1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave
and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue,
and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that
craves a particular commodity, any thing less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the
facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the
spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and
theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with
God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to
weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout
nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher’s Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of
the god Audate, replies,

“His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours;

Our valors are our best gods.”

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil
begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base.



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Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.

There can be no darker nor more devastating tragedy that the death of a man’s faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.

Saul Alinsky

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We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them
truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own
reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping
man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.
Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically
caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him
because men hated him. “To the persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals are swift.”



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Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man.

For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all
honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.

The best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your own arm.

Swedish Proverb

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As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with
those foolish Israelites, ‘Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we
will obey.’ Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple
doors, and recites fables merely of his brother’s, or his brother’s brother’s God. Every new mind is a new
classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a
Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the
depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil,
is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of
some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man’s relation to the Highest. Such is
Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to
the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby.
It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his
master’s mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a
speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with
the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. They
cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see, how you can see; ‘It must be somehow that you stole
the light from us.’ They do not yet perceive, that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any
cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well,
presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the
immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the
first morning.

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt,
retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in
the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel
that duty is our place.



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It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling,

whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination
for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or
Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast
where they were, like an axis of the earth.

The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.

Arnold Bennett

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The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion
call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the
expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men
like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and
benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding
somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not
carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his
will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream
that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace
my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the
sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be
intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.



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Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At

home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated
with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace
my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples,
and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
identical, that I fled from.

No one is free who is not master of himself.

Pythagoras

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3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action.

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our
bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our
houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our
tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they
have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own
thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the
Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to
any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him,
considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the
government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment
will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of
a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half
possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is,
nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where
is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton?



● ● ●

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

It’s a waste of time to imitate, to do something other people can do as good or better than you. I make the media that I want to consume. I
started bOING bOING as a print zine because it was the kind of zine I wanted to read. Boing Boing was the blog I always wanted. MAKE was
the do-it-yourself magazine I wanted to subscribe to. It’s fine to be inspired by others, but if you imitate others, you will never find out who
you are.

Mark Frauenfelder

● ● ●


Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow.
Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you
cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as
that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but
different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue,
deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the
same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature.



● ● ●

Every great man is a unique.

Greatness is defined by a desire and ability to change to world for the better. The great among us see the world in an unique way: the sound
of the wind, the movement of people, the energy of space just feel/sound/appear different. They see what should be, not what is, and more
importantly, live as if the change is now. Their life beats at a different tempo that us normal people can only hope to hear in our dreams. I
actively listen to the world around me and intently learn from those that provide real hope for positive and lasting change through their
unique way of living.

Micah Baldwin

● ● ●


Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld
again.



● ● ●

Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy
heart

The past years I’ve focused more than ever on following my gut or heart, and they have been, with out question, the most exciting years of my
life to date. My life has taken a 180 turn because of it. There are certain places one can only get to by following this exact advice. The palace
in Jaipur, where I writing this right now is probably one of them.

Michael Radparvar

● ● ●


4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume
themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual
changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not
amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old
instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a
pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a
spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men,
and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike
the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow
into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks
so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun.
A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in
the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little;
and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his memory;
his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a
question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by
a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a
Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men
are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of
the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to
educate greater men than Plutarch’s heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the
race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He
who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, the
founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.
The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so
much in their fishing boats, as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources
of science and art.



● ● ●

No greater men are now than ever were.

I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

● ● ●


Galileo, with an opera glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since.
Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and
perishing of means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries
before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among
the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling
back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect
army, says Las Casas, “without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages, until, in
imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and
bake his bread himself.”



● ● ●

Galileo, with an opera glass, discovered a more splendid series

of celestial phenomena than any one since.

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.

Galileo

● ● ●


Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same
particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up
a nation today, next year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of
self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem
the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these,
because they feel them to be assaults on property.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man
becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he
see that it is accidental, came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it
does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber
takes it away. But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is
living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or
bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. “Thy lot or portion of life,” said
the Caliph Ali, “is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” Our dependence on these
foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous
conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from
Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself
stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon
conventions, and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit
you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands
alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man
better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must
presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is
weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself
unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs,
works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.



● ● ●

They measure their esteem of each other by what each has,

and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes
ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature.

Measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

Warren Buffet

● ● ●


So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls.
But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In
the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear
from her rotations. 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.



● ● ●

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring
you peace but the triumph of principles.

No one can be great, or good, or happy except through the inward efforts of themselves.

Frederick W. Robertson

● ● ●

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book wouldn’t have happened without the spark and instigation of Alex Godin, who found it and
pushed it forward as a great Domino title, not to mention as the subject for a speech and the bible for a
way of life. Thanks also to Alex Miles Younger who tirelessly tweaked the layout, turning an old book new.
Thank you to the contributors who gave the book a fresh update, including Micah Baldwin, Jesse Dylan,
Marie Forleo, Mark Frauenfelder, Milton Glaser, Chris Guillebeau, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Ji Lee, Ingrid
Newkirk, Susan Piver, Steve Pressfield, Michael Radparvar, Pamela Slim, Kyeli Smith, Pace Smith,
Elizabeth Streb, Colleen Wainwright, and Colin Wright. A very special thank you to Jeffrey Fry of Potent
Quotables who provided us with a wealth of quotes in our time of need.


The Domino Project team consists of Amber Rae, Willie Jackson, Michael Parrish DuDell, Lauryn
Ballesteros, Amy Richards, Ishita Gupta, Alex Miles Younger and your host, Seth Godin.



Thanks also to the very self-reliant folks in Seattle, including Mary Ellen Fullhart, Sarah Gelman, Terry
Goodman, Victoria Griffith, Megan Jacobsen, Galen Maynard, Lynette Mong, Sarah Tomashek, and Alan
Turkus.



Ralph Waldo Emerson may be long dead, but he’s a role model for many of us (not the dead part, of
course). The idea that one can make a living doing work that resonates—spreading ideas that matter—is
new again, and we’re glad to highlight him as an example. This book is dedicated to anyone willing to step
up and avoid the hobgoblins. With relish.

 ABOUT THE DOMINO PROJECT

Books worth buying are books worth sharing. We hope you’ll find someone to give this copy to. You can
find more about what we’re up to at www.thedominoproject.com.


Here are three ways you can spread the ideas in this manifesto:

1. Hold a discussion group in your office. Get people to read the book and come in and argue about it.
How open is your company to innovation and failure? What will you do if your competitors get better
at it than you are?

2. Give away copies. Lots of them. It turns out that when everyone in a group reads the same thing,
conversations go differently.

3. Write the names of some of your peers on the inside back cover of this book (or scrawl them on a
Post-it on your Kindle). As each person reads the book, have them scratch off their name and add
someone else’s.

We hope you’ll share.

 ABOUT THE COVER

Adrian Gaut (http://www.agaut.com) is among a small handful of photographers setting the standard in
architecture, portraiture and automotive work. His evocative photo for the Best Made Company
(http://www.bestmadeco.com/) captured one element of Emerson’s message. The quiet strength of the tool
(and the photo) remind us that in an ever-faster digital world, sometimes it’s the work we do on our own
that truly matters.