What is your favorite quote from Emerson's Self-Reliance?

Question

mine is the one that is like every heart beats to that iron string

Answer 1

I love that quote as well...

There are so many truisms and gems that it's hard to pick one favorite, but I think mine would be:

"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 am teenager living in Los Angeles, and to remember this quote at an age when everyone seems so desperate to conform, to be vapid bobble heads merely in agreement with whomever is deemed to be the leader of the pack that day, and in a city where everyone craves glittery affirmation and entourages......is hard to do, but I keep trying.

my runner-up favs:

"Insist on yourself; never imitate."

"To be great is to be misunderstood." (my mom gave me a magnet with that quote on it when I was 12 & felt like the world didn't get me)

"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."

"Ne te quaesiveris extra" which means "Do not seek outside yourself.” In other words, “look within."

& last but not least:

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

I think we'd be a more productive & content society if everyone read this.......

Thx for a good question. : )

Answer 2

Although I agree that your selection (i.e., "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") is poignant, my favorite is the following from Series 1:

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