“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, 1841 · American essayist
Chapter 4
On Becoming Yourself
“The superior man is distressed by his want of ability. He is not distressed by men's not knowing him.”
Confucius, c. 479 BC · Chinese teacher of the Spring and Autumn period
“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
William Shakespeare, 1603 · Polonius counselling his son Laertes as he leaves home
“He who knows other men is discerning; he who knows himself is intelligent.”
Lao Tzu, c. 400 BC · Chinese sage, traditional author of the Tao Te Ching
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
Michel de Montaigne, 1580 · French essayist
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
Henry David Thoreau, 1854 · American writer, from his two years at Walden Pond
“I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”
Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792 · English writer, arguing for the education of girls
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
Charlotte Bronte, 1847 · English novelist, spoken by Jane Eyre
“Only when I can say, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, when and where I enter, then and there the whole race enters with me.”
Anna Julia Cooper, 1892 · born enslaved in North Carolina, teacher and scholar
“If one man conquer in battle a thousand times thousand men, and if another conquer himself, he is the greatest of conquerors.”
The Dhammapada, c. 300 BC · the earliest collected sayings of the Buddha
A nurse who sat with the dying for years heard one regret above all others: that they had lacked the courage to live their own life rather than the expected one.
Bronnie Ware, 2011 · Australian palliative care nurse, from years at bedsides
“No kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841 · American essayist
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