"Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not."
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Self Reliance quotes
Self Reliance
74 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside self reliance — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Self Reliance quotes (page 3 of 4)
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"Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence."
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"For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing."
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"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism."
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"Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself."
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"He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time."
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"Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul."
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"A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity."
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"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."
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"We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking."
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"In most books, the I, of first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference."
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"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it."
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"My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady."
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"Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this."
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"I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways."
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"He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances."
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"The only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it."
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