Questioning something is fine, if you have cause to question it.
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. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for
the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us
by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the
highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and
traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. 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. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us
than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored
inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a
stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the
time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
Excerpt from Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emmerson
I respect your opinion and most everyone elses but I dont look to your or anyone else for the cause to question what I do.
