Self-Reliance

"Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist..."

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genious."

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and 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 worls to live after 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"

" It is so bad to be misundertood? 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"

Ralph Waldo Emerson