Self-Reliance

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or does otherwise, shall give him no peace.

(Emerson 2017, 1-3)

The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.

(Emerson 2017, 6-7)

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

(Emerson 2017, 9)

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

(Emerson 2017, 12-13)

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions.

(Emerson 2017, 14)

If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.

When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and rustle of the corn.

(Emerson 2017, 21)

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique.

(Emerson 2017, 35)

But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky.

(Emerson 2017, 36)

They measure their esteem of each other by what each had, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature.