Let him not wrong the truth & his own experience by too stiffly standing on the cold & proud doctrine of self sufficiency
The selfsubsistent shakes like a reed before a sneering paragraph in the Newspaper or even at a difference of opinion concerning something to be done expressed in a private letter from just such another shaking bulrush as himself. He sits expecting a dinner guest with a suspense which paralyses his inventive or his acquiring faculties. He finds the solitude of two or three entire days when mother, wife, & child are gone, tedious & dispiriting. Let him not wrong the truth & his own experience by too stiffly standing on the cold & proud doctrine of self sufficiency.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:433
