Meaning of “To guide our own craft, we must be…”

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843; the sentence appears in Fuller’s dialogic reflection on temperament, inquiry, and following the direction one’s own character requires.

Moral printed after “Hercules and the Wagoner” in the Townsend translation; Hercules first tells the driver to help himself.

The Human Machine, discussion of using experience for self-command. Bennett’s claim is philosophical self-training advice; it does not imply that every failure is beneficial or emotionally easy.

On Liberty, Chapter III; Mill contrasts imitation with actively choosing one’s own plan of life.

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.

Walden; Thoreau contrasts one’s own deliberate track with paths chosen by others.