"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
To Be Yourself In A World
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
About this quote
This saying is widely attributed to Emerson but no specific source in his writings has been verified — Goodreads tags it "attributed-no-source." The sentiment closely reflects the argument of Self-Reliance (1841), where Emerson wrote "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members... The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion." The exact phrasing appears to be a 20th-century distillation of that essay rather than a direct quotation.
Source
Attributed, paraphrased from Self-Reliance (1841)
