Trust Yourself: Emerson on Self-Reliance as the Essence of Genius and What It Means to Be a Nonconformist

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

Original article by Maria Popovs for The Marginalian

“We all have the same inner life,” the great painter Agnes Martin observed. “The difference lies in the recognition. The artist has to recognize what it is.” Decades later, Cheryl Strayed considered the raw material of that recognition in an altogether magnificent conversation: “When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.” And yet we spend our lives mistrusting that innermost voice and instead deferring our truths to the voice of the outside world, turning to others, in ways subtle and staggering, to tell us who we are and what is real.

No one has made more beautiful nor more convincing a case for trusting our inner voice than Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) in his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” perhaps the best-known piece in his Essays and Lectures (public library | free download) — that endlessly rewarding trove of Emerson’s wisdom on the two pillars of friendship, the life of the mind, the key to personal growth, what beauty really means, and how to live with maximum aliveness.

At thirty-nine, Emerson writes:

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. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost.

In a sentiment his soul-brother Henry David Thoreau would come to echo a decade later, Emerson laments the ease with which we accept the judgments and opinions of others as objective truth while dismissing our own — a lamentation all the timelier a century and a half later, as the 24-hour media cycle feeds us ready-made opinions under the guise of objective news:

Read full article at The Marginalian