Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on Being Yourself)

"Resolve to be thyself; and know that he,
Who finds himself, loses his misery!"—English critic and poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), “Self-Dependence,” in The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (1897)

Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on Self-Knowledge)

“O air-born voice! long since, severely clear,
A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear:
‘Resolve to be thyself; and know that he,
Who finds himself, loses his misery!’"—English poet-critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), “Self-Dependence,” from The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1840-1867 (1909)

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on How ‘The Force of Character is Cumulative’)

“The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.” —U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Self-Reliance," in Essays, First Series (1841)

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Genius as “Our Own Rejected Thoughts”)

“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” from Essays: First Series (1841)

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Why “Imitation Is Suicide”)

‘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 to 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…. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays, First Series (1841)