"Self-Reliance"  (first published in Essays, 1841)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Our age is retrospective.  It builds sepulchers to the fathers.

 It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.  The foregoing

generations beheld God face to face; we, through their eyes. 

Why should we not enjoy an original relation to the universe?

 Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight

and not of tradition, and a religion of revelation to us, and not

 a history of theirs? . . . why should we grope among the dry

bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade

 out of its faded wardrobe?  The sun shines today also.  There

 is more wool and flax in the fields.  There are new lands, new

 men, new thoughts.  Let us demand our own works and laws

 and worship.  --from the "Introduction" to Nature, 1836

To believe in your own thoughts, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men--that is genius.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.  Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.  In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.

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 for 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 on that plot of ground which is given him to till.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. . . Great men have always done so.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes.  That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have

not. . . . The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.  Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.  The virtue is most request is conformity.  Self-reliance is its aversion.  It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. . . . No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.  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 is what is against it.  A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.  I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me.  I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.  I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.  Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.

Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good institutions.  Are they my poor?  I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give such men as do not belong to me to whom I do not belong . . . . though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule . . . Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade.  Their works are done as an apology . . . I do not wish to expiate, but to live.  My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

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

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you, is that it scatters your force.  It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character . . . If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-Society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers--under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. . . . But do your work, and I shall know you.  Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.  A man must consider what a blind-man’s-bluff is this game of conformity.  If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.

Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion.  This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true.

For nonconformity, the world whips you with its displeasure.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder?  Why drag about this corpse of your memory.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.  With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

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.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency.

Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet.  Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with an air of a charity-boy, a bastard, an interloper in the world which exists for him.  But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculpted a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these.  To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air . . .

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic.  In history our imagination plays us false.  Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John or Edward in a small house and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to both . . .

What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shots a ray of beauty even into the trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear?  This inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.  We denote this primary wisdom as Intuitions, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.  In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.  It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice . . .

If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. . . . Whence then this worship of the past?  The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage.  He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose.  These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.  He cannot be happy an strong until he too lives in nature in the present, above time.

Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet to hear God himself unless he speaks the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul.  We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives.  We are like children who repeat by rote sentences of granddames and tutors.

Life only avails, not the having lived.  Power ceases in the instant of repose.

This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with a rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.

But now we are a mob.  Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water, of the urn of other men.  We must go alone.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

At times the whole world seems to be in a conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.  Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at they closet door and say—“Come out unto us.”  But keep thy state; come not into their confusion.

[L]et us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war . . . This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth.  Check this lying hospitality and lying affection.  Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. 

Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupation, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.

Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous.  Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good is vicious . . . . But prayer as a means to effect a private end, is meanness and theft.  It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness.  As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg.

As men's prayers area disease of the will, so are creeds a disease of the intellect . . . . Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother’s, or his brother’s brother’s God.

It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans.

Travelling is a fool's paradise.  Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.  At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness.  I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

As to our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society.  All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances.  It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other . . . Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

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.  The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows a little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind.  His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance company increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.  Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, the learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property.  They measure their esteem of each other, by what each has, and not what each is.

He who knows that Power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs [and] works miracles . . .

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.  Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.