Emerson's "Self-Reliance" celebrates originality and nonconformity. He was opposed to people imitating others and famously wrote: 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. Emerson believed that true genius lay in following one's unique instincts and proclivities and not in copying others....
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