Self Reliance
Self Reliance Believe in your own idea, believe that what is true for you in your confidential heart is true for all men – that is the gift. Say your latent convictions, and it will be the universal sense; for the deep, in due course it will become closer, and our first idea is given back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected ideas; they remind us with some alienated majesty. The phenomenal works of art have nothing more moving for us than we have lessons. They teach us to fulfill our spontaneous impression with the affable stiffness, especially when the eternal screaming is on the other side. Tomorrow a stranger will say with common sense magisterially precisely what we have constantly thought and felt, and we will be forced to shame the opinion of another.
There is an occasion in the education of every man when the conviction comes that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for good or bad as his partisans; that the broad universe is full of good, no grain of nutritious corn can come except through its work bestowed on that land of land that is given to till. The power that resides in him is new in nature, and he doesn’t know what everyone can do, nor will he know until he has tried.
Trust yourself: each heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place where divine providence has failed in your favor, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have done it, and have always trusted in relation to their era.
The man is as if he were put in jail for his conscience. As soon as he has acted or spoken with the resounding success of who is a committed person, he has ensured the comparison or hatred of hundreds, whose love must enter his account now. There is no average for this.
Ah, what could happen again in its neutrality!
Who could avoid all the promises and, having followed, be able to observe again from the same innocence unbearable, immune, impartial, inasiable – must always be formidable.
The voices we hear in solitude become pale and inaudible when we enter the world.
The society in all the parts is in the conspiracy against the virile age of each one of its members. The company is an anonymous company, in which the members agree to deliver the freedom and culture of the diner, for the best assurance of their bread to each shareholder.
The most required virtue is compliance. Independence is your aversion. He does not worship realities and creators, but names and customs. The truth is more beautiful than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have to go towards it – if not, it is nothing.
What I have to do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule, equally arduous in intellectual and real life, can serve to completely differentiate between greatness and cruelty. It is the toughest because you will always have those who believe they know what your duty is better than you.
It is easy to live in the world after the opinion of the rest; it is easy to live in the solitude of ourselves; but the great man is the one who in the middle of the crowd keeps the independence of loneliness with perfect sweetness. Where does this veneration of the past come from? The centuries are conspirators against sanity and the authority of the soul.
Time and space are nothing but the physiological colors that the eye creates, but the soul is light: where it is, it is day; where it was, it is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it is anything other than a cheerful apology or parable of my present and future being.
The man is shy and upset; it is not more straight; He does not dare to say “I Think”, “I Am”, but he quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed at the blade of grass or the blooming rose. These roses under my window make no reference to old or better roses, they are what they are; They exist with God today. There is no time in them. There is only the rose; It is perfect in every moment of its existence.
Man postpones or remembers; He does not live in the present, but with a reversed eye he regrets the past, or, inattentive to the wealth that surrounds him, he stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he lives with nature in the present, over time. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is by no means known or common; you will not perceive the footsteps of any other; you will not see the face of man; you will not hear any name; – The way, the idea, the good will be completely strange and new. It will exclude example and experience. Fear and hope are the same below that. The soul raised on passion contemplates eternal identity and causality, perceives the identity and existence of Truth and Good, and calms down knowing that all things are going well.
Only life serves, not having lived. We must be alone. Isolation must precede true society. But its isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, it must be the ascent. Sometimes the whole world seems to be in the conspiracy to import it with emphatic insignificance. Friends, customers, children, illness, fear, desire, charity, all knock at the door at the same time and tell us “come with us.” But keep your status; Don’t go out in your confusion. The power that affected men to bother me gave them a weak curiosity. No man can come near me except through my actions. I must be myself. I can’t break myself for you, or for you. If you can love me for what I am, we will be the happiest. If you cannot, I will deserve that you can. I will not hide my likes or dislikes. I will trust what is deep is sacred, what I will do before the sun and the moon we are only that rejoice inwardly and my heart pointed. If you are noble, I will want it: if you are not, I will not hurt you or myself for hypocritical attention. If you are sincere, but not in the same truth with me, be loyal to your peers; I will look for mine. I do not do this selfishly but humbly and honestly.
But you could cause pain to these friends. Yes, but I cannot sell my freedom and my power, to save your sensibility. In addition, all people have their moments of reason, when they look in the region of absolute truth; Then they will justify me and do the same. The populace thinks that his rejection of popular essays is a rejection of every standard, mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to disguise her sins. But the law of conscience prevails. If our young people fail in their first companies they lose all their heart. If the young merchant fails, the men say it is destroyed. If the most dedicated genius studies in one of our universities and has not installed in the course of the following year in an office in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it will seem to his friends and himself that he is in the right to be discouraged and complaining for the rest of his days. A robust boy from New Hampshire or Vermont, who tests all professions in turn, who unites them, cultivates them, sells from door to door, keeps a school, preaches, publishes a newspaper, goes to congress, buys a town, and how much more, in the following years, and always as a cat falls on its feet, it is worth what hundreds of these city dolls. He walks side by side with his days and feels no shame for not “studying a profession”, because he no longer postpones his life, but lives. It does not have a possibility, but hundreds of possibilities. Discontent is the lack of independence: they are ailments of the will. Regret the calamities if you can help the sick; if not, attend your own work and the evil will begin to be repaired. Our compassion is just a base.
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. The man who helps himself is always welcome to gods and men. For him all the doors are wide open; all languages welcome him, all eyes pursue him with desire, everyone crowns him with honors. Our love goes to him, and he accepts it because he doesn’t need it.
The intellect is vagrant, and our education system promotes uneasiness. Our minds move when our bodies are forced to move at home. We imitate and what is imitation but the journey of the mind?
The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It is in his own opinion that the artist requested his model. It was an application of his own idea for what should be done and the conditions of being seen.
Demand yourself; Never imitate. His own gift can give him every moment with the cumulative force of the cultivation of a lifetime; but to those who have adopted another’s talent, they have only an improvised means of possession.
Society never advances. Go back as fast on one side as you advance on the other. It goes through constant changes; It is cruel, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; But this change is not improvement. For everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
Dependence on Property, including dependence on the governments that protect it, is the lack of independence. They measure their estimate for what each one has, and not for what each one has. But a cultured man is ashamed of his property, apart from a new respect for his nature. He especially hates what he has if he sees that it is fortuitous, – if he came for the inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not a possession; It does not belong to him, it has no root in it and simply lies there because no revolution or thief has taken it away.
He who knows that power is innate, that he is weak because he has sought good outside of him and in another place and therefore perceptive, throws himself into his idea without hesitation, in a moment he vindicates, is in the upright position, drives its members create miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.
Ramon Marcel Arellano Baez 