"To Believe Your Own Thought, to believe that which is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men –that is genius."
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 him to till.
The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the Divine Providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, and the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, excerpt from, "Self-Reliance"
