Meaning of “Though she be but little, she is fierce.”

Leaves of Grass (1860), poem “Walt Whitman’s Caution,” represented on Wikisource from the 1860 edition.

Essays, First Series, essay II, “Self-Reliance,” Project Gutenberg #2944. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist” follows Emerson’s claim that society conspires against the manhood of its members through conformity. The represented Gutenberg witness prints a comma after “man,” while the frozen catalog quotation omits that punctuation; the wording is otherwise the same. It remains Transcendentalist moral rhetoric about self-trust and independence rather than a universal instruction to reject social norms or expertise.

Essay “Self-Reliance.”

The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, saying 997, D. Lyman Jr. translation (1856).

“Invictus,” first published in Henley’s 1888 Book of Verses (written 1875) and represented through the public-domain poem text. This is the second stanza’s closing line, following “Under the bludgeonings of chance”; this collection keeps the poem’s defiant lyric voice rather than treating it as a guarantee that adversity can always be mastered.

Citizenship in a Republic, commonly called the Man in the Arena speech; Roosevelt contrasts action with spectatorship.