Ralph Waldo Emerson Individualism Quotes & Sayings

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

We can only feel happy and fulfilled if we're engaged in our (soul's) purpose. — Doreen Virtue

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

He has seen enough of daily evil to be thankful for small goods that come his way. — Bernard Pomerance

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

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

I was to be a photographer and that was that. It did everything for me. I love people. I needed the camera more than ever I would have believed. — Lotte Jacobi

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

Positivity can be a negative," I tell her, "if it's used to diminish events that should be cause for concern. Saying 'bad things happen to good people' or "God doesn't give anyone more than they can handle', for instance, isn't necessarily helpful to the person to whom something bad happened
it is much more beneficial to those who wish to be dismissive- who don't really care to think about the why or how or who. And if we cease to see the real human part in events
if instead, we relegate human experiences to some sort of mystical concept like karma, destiny or everything happens for a reason, and consider more realistic views to be negative
then we diminish compassion and empathy, as well as the possibility of positive change. — Jane Devin

What you call flaws are really just scars and wounds accumulated over a lifetime. — Deepak Chopra

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