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.

In 1841, the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson published his most profound essay, ‘Self-Reliance’. In it, he set himself the task of trying to understand where greatness comes from, in business, government, science and the arts – and his answer was touchingly close to home. Geniuses are those who know how to introspect and trust in their own

The reader who would dig to the philosophical foundations of this is advised to read Hegel and Emerson for himself. In writing this book I have sacrificed all other considerations to

As Emerson said in his essay on “Self-Reliance”: “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 t