Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

To me, authority is something that a freer spirit, a more independent mind, and a person who can handle the world, doesn't need guidance from.

Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Only the self-sufficient stand alone - most people follow the crowd and imitate.

Self-sufficiency, independence, the capacity to stand apart, to differ, to resist, and to defy-all are modes of being human.

I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.

I guess I'm just fiercely independent.

I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.

I'm an independent.

I'm a very independent person.

We are such lovers of self-reliance, that we excuse in a man many sins, if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's good opinion.

To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone.

Discontent is want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.

What if I don't want a leader? Where does that vote go? I do good on my own. I don't want to be led.

Whoever regards human beings as a herd and flees them as swiftly as he can will no doubt be overtaken by them and impaled on theirhorns.

I think one thing my mother always instilled in me was a sense of individuality. Being an only child, I never thought I had to rely on anyone. I was never afraid to be alone and I was never afraid to be my own person. So when all my friends were like, "Let's smoke weed," I was like, "I'm not doing it." It wasn't because I was trying to be a rebel or because I didn't like it or I was anti-drugs. I just didn't do it because I didn't want to do it, and if I didn't want to do it, I wasn't doing it. That was it.

The first rule of survival is: Make your own rules. The hell anyone thinks about the way you're acting; listen only to yourself.

Freedom is the slogan of the strong, who feel self confident, self sufficient to do it alone.

You can't rely on anything. At the end of the day, all you have is yourself.

The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature. Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate.

Custom, madam, is the law of fools, but it shall never govern me.

'He who seeks may easily get lost himself. It is a crime to go apart and be alone.' Thus speaks the herd.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.