Genius of Thought

In my opinion, no one could "say it better" than Ralph Waldo Emerson. I believe if ever there was a human being whose writing was often inspired by the Great Spirit, it must be this man. Below is an excerpt from his Self Reliance essay. Read and contemplate the nature of your own thoughts - gifts from the infinite mind.

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may.  The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain.  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, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought.  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. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.  Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this.  They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.  Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

My hope for those who follow me is that they recognize the genius of their own minds without permission to do so, and come to live in the light which shines from their own hearts, without shame.

With All My Love,
Pappy