The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique. — Walt Disney
In 1831, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem titled “Γνώθι Σεαυτόν”, or Gnothi Seauton (‘Know Thyself’), on the theme of ‘God in thee.’ The poem was an anthem to Emerson’s belief that to “know thyself” meant knowing the God that Emerson felt existed within each person.
I think it was this fundamental belief that led him to erect a citadel of self-reliance for mankind in his writing. He has inspired me with his refrain and so here are a few passages that I have picked up from his various essays that eloquently bring that ideology to life.
1. 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.
2. 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 Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.
3. 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.
4. No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser, — the secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.
5. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, — “Always do what you are afraid to do.”
Coda:
For me, the essence of Emerson is to strive tirelessly to unearth our divine uniqueness in this lifetime. Despite all the eddy currents of our human existence.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want a deeper connection with our community, please join us as a Premium Member today.
Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS. Need more info?
A complete list of benefits is here.
—
Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com