Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)

Trust thyself, Emerson writes, and every heart vibrates to that iron string. _Self-Reliance_ is the sound of a man refusing, line by line, to be smaller than his own conviction. The essay's genius is its aim: not the timid or the dull but the respectable conformist, the charitable joiner, the person so eager for approval that they have quietly traded away their own judgment and called it virtue. Emerson names that surrender cowardice, however gentle the motive, and insists that nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. The sentences arrive like struck flints, "imitation is suicide," "to be great is to be misunderstood," each one daring you to flinch. And then the trap: to nod along with Emerson is to find a new master to obey, the very failure he is warning against. The only way to prove him right is to close the essay and stop listening to him.