Quotes & Sayings About Individuality By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imitation cannot go above its model. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every company, at every fireside, with the riches of nature, when he hears so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners, which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of face. He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a divine building, if the soul will build thereon. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man is known by the books he reads. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our expenses are all for conformity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson