Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages... In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried

Emerson. Emancipation is the demand of civilization". I wish to learn this language not that I may know a new grammar but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.

"
His essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking[citation needed] and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers writers and poets that have followed him. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of publiRalph Waldo Emersond essays and more than 1500 public lectures across the United States. Together with Nature these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.