I'm Self- Reliant (Emerson Notes)

What I understood out of "On Self- Reliance":

• Do not try to be consistent ----------> blocks your creativity
• Trust yourself and don't concern yourself with what you've said or done in the past
• Emerson talks about letting yourself free, learn, grow, and extend our understanding
• You have the right to be who you are and you shouldn't let anyone decide you future for you.
• Everyone's life should be unique and original.
• "envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide" -------> Everyone has something great to express. We shouldn't try to imitate anyone, and if we do imitate someone else, our originality will be killed.
• Nobody knows your special gifts and you won't know until you express them. 
• Follow your interest and interest will lead you where you need to go

Quotes from the Essay I don't know what they mean (mind as well copy and paste the whole essay)

• Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base.
• Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.
• Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.
• Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them. 
• Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these.