I’m reading Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance, and in the very first paragraph is something that reminded me of someone we all know.

The paragraph reads thus:

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… 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.

Now, I know I’m taking these words out of context – call it poetic license with a disclaimer – but I’ll be damned if our 7 books/month-reading President isn’t channeling these words from Emerson.

Of course, if he is, he’d probably do well to remember Emerson’s followup:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Just a thought. :-)