Quotes & Sayings About Individualism By Emerson

All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale's story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full (1998).52 — Epictetus

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these must. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Part of the power of Emerson's individualism is his insistence, at crucial moments, that individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence. — Robert D. Richardson

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards — Ralph Waldo Emerson

An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In daily life what distinguishes the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him. — Ralph Waldo Emerson