Never mistake yourself to be great, or designed for greatness, because you have been visited by an indistinct and shadowy hope that something is reserved for you beyond the common lot. It is easier to aspire than to do the deeds. The very idleness which leaves you leisure to dream of honour is the insurmountable obstacle between you and it. Those who are fitly furnished for the weary passage from mediocrity to greatness seldom find time or appetite to indulge that hungry and boisterous importunity for excitement which weaker intellects are prone to display. That which helps them on to eminence is in itself sufficient to engross the attention of all their powers, and to occupy the aching void…Greatness is a property for which no man gets credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.
Early March, 1822: The Journals Vol 1, (121-122) Emerson, age 18.
Two years later:
“Tut,” says Fortune, - “and if you fail, it shall never be from lack of vanity.”
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