“Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its law, and conduct you to a higher degree of power. You must obey your heart.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.”
— Thomas Jefferson Primary source“Insist on yourself; never imitate.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“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.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“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.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“Since then I never pay any attention to anything by experts. I calculate everything myself.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business.”
— Andrew S. Grove Primary source“We must be our own [friend] before we can be another’s.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“If you want a faithful servant, and one that you like—serve yourself.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“A plowman on his legs is higher than a gentleman on his knees.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“If you’d have a servant that you like, serve yourself.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“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.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“There is nothing in war, which I cannot do by my own hands. If there is nobody to make gunpowder, I can manufacture it. The guncarriages I know how to construct. If it is necessary to make cannons at the forge, I can make them. The details of working them in battle, if it is necessary to teach, I shall teach them. In administration, it is I alone who have arranged the finances, as you know.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte Disputed“Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson DisputedGreatness Servant Self-help Self-confidence