Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays - Self Reliance

I just bought a book called The Daily Reader, by Fred White http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Reader-Selections-Productive-Meaningful/dp/1582975892, and while on the plane to Tampa last night, I didn't just read one page, I read 200 pages, to which I identified with the selections made by Fred White, what most related to me, what touched me, and spoke to me.

One of the selections I stumbled upon was Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays on Self Reliance. What rings so true (to me at least) in his essay is this:

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, & it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each..."

Self-reliance is about how it is the aversion to conformity. I relate to this because as much as I do try to conform, there is that part of me that wants to be free, that doesn't want to conform, such as when I dance in the streets. I don't want to be confined to just dancing in lounges/nightclubs, I want to challenge the status quo, and declare my own personal independence. That I don't need to be in a nightclub to justify my dancing. I just am.

He further writes: "Nothing is last sacred but the integrity of our own mind...No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature...the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it."