LOVED this admonishment to be one's self, and speak one's mind! Here's a brief excerpt--
"To believe your own thought, to believe what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men, --that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, --and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton, is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another." ( )

Read “Self-Reliance” and “The Divinity School Address,” that’s about it. Not knocked out but I have a hard time grasping older writing so I assume the shortcoming is mine and not the text. Also things like this I’ve probably absorbed so much of it secondhand in my life that the stuff seems obvious or banal or whatever - I’m sure it wasn’t in his day, and he must have seemed original and shocking , but it just doesn’t set me on fire.

Life-changing. Wish I had read it 20 years ago. ( )

Have to assimilate, then read it again (and again). ( )

Emerson's Self-Reliance is considered by many to be integral to the beginning of the transcendentalist movement, and while I am not especially a fan of transcendentalism as a whole, I do believe that this work is one of the more coherent proponents of the individual over society. Some of Emerson's arguments against the individual obtaining anything useful from societal, familial, religious, or governmental organizations may lend themselves towards an increasing slide towards solipsism - nothing exists in a vacuum - and his apparent distaste for travel seems xenophobic in nature (if not intention), his overall treatise that exceptional individuals (he tends to focus on 'artistic geniuses' more often than not) become so by rejecting cultural norms and accepted knowledge and distancing themselves from the common man and his organizational trappings. There are definitely holes in some of his arguments that could be exploited in an open debate, but the bulk of this essay speaks honestly of the need for the individual to seek its own path. ( )