Source identified
“I WAS A MAN NOW.”
The emphatic line records Douglass’s restored sense of manhood and dignity after resisting physical domination; it belongs to a specific autobiographical struggle against enslavement.
Source note: My Bondage and My Freedom, immediately after Douglass describes his resistance to Covey; capitalization follows the represented Project Gutenberg text.
Source identified
“The Ideal is in thyself”
Voice: Fictional narrator · Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (framed voice)
The phrase turns the search for an ideal life inward, arguing that a person’s task is to shape present circumstances through capacities and standards not supplied wholly from outside.
Source note: Sartor Resartus, Book II, Chapter IX; Project Gutenberg #1051. The surrounding passage is highly rhetorical and spoken through the book’s fictional-philosophical construction rather than as a plain autobiographical maxim.
Source identified
“Insist on yourself; never imitate.”
Originality begins with developing one’s own capacities rather than copying another person’s surface style.
Source note: Self-Reliance; Emerson gives the imperative while arguing for originality, self-trust, and resistance to imitation rather than dependence on another person’s model.
Source identified
“The only possible society is oneself.”
Voice: Fictional character · Lord Goring
The comic exaggeration makes self-company part of Wilde’s joke about society while still centering comfort with oneself.
Source note: An Ideal Husband, Act III, spoken by Lord Goring immediately before the lifelong-romance line.
Source identified
“It is not selfish to think for oneself.”
Independent thought is distinguished from selfishness: forming one’s own judgment can protect individuality without requiring indifference to other people.
Source note: The Soul of Man under Socialism; Wilde defends individual thought while criticizing social pressure that mistakes conformity for moral virtue.
Source identified
“I was a changed being after that fight.”
Douglass identifies resistance to Covey as a decisive psychological turning point in which a previously crushed sense of agency and personhood begins to return.
Source note: My Bondage and My Freedom, account of the fight with Edward Covey; Douglass explicitly presents the episode as a turning point in his life under slavery.