Dinning.....................................

      Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men.  But what is that to the purpose?  A living dog is better than a dead lion.  Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?  Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.
      Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?  If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.   Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.  It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak.  Shall he turn his spring into summer?   If the conditions of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?  We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.  Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?
- Henry David Thoreau,   Walden, as excerpted from the chapter "Conclusion"