Self-Reliance and Other Essays

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson appears never to have been really a boy. He was always serene and thoughtful, impressing all who knew him with that spirituality which was his most distinguishing characteristic.

These principles of life can all be enumerated in twenty words—self-reliance, culture, intellectual and moral independence, the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of labor, and high ideals.

To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running underground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts.

The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts.

The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man. Henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit. Henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.

I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

But genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead.

There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said.

We all know that as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge.

As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.”

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,—to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires set the hearts of their youth on flame.

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing.

Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their publ...

He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.

Lots of fancy words here. Essentially, with knowledge, we can affect our environment.

The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims.

What a testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief!

This seems to say that in enying others, we lessen ourselves because it means we are content in being less.

They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man’s light, and feel it to be their own element.

Men such as they are very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money,—the “spoils,” so called, “of office.” And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest.

The wings of Time are black and white, Pied with morning and with night. Mountain tall and ocean deep Trembling balance duly keep. In changing moon, in tidal wave, Glows the feud of Want and Have.

Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the preachers taught.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor’s life is not safe.

Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

He is, unfortunately, dead wrong. Sometimes, maybe, but he oversells it by quite the margin.

They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature,—the sweet, without the other side,—the bitter.

The parted water reunites behind our hand.

he sees the mermaid’s head, but not the dragon’s tail; and thinks he can cut off that which he would have, from that which he would not have.

Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind; but having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they involuntarily made amends to reason, by tying up the hands of so bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England. Prometheus knows one secret which Jove must bargain for; Minerva, another. He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of them. “Of all the gods, I only know the keys That ope the solid doors within whose vaults His thunders sleep.”

The Rare Source: The line "I alone of the gods know the keys to the house where his thunderbolt is sealed" is spoken by Athena in the play "Eumenides" by Aeschylus, from the 5th century BCE. This is a very specific and unusual reference. In the play, Athena uses this statement to assert her supreme authority and to persuade a group of vengeful goddesses (the Furies) to accept a compromise.

Harm watch, harm catch.—Curses

The exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others.

The vulgar proverb, “I will get it from his purse or get it from his skin,” is sound philosophy.

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well what he hovers for, there is death somewhere.

He is great who confers the most benefits. He is base—and that is the one base thing in the universe—to receive favors and render none.

Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.

On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.

This assumes you learn from it.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

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.

This is highlighted many times, but staggeringly wrong. It even seems to go against transendentalists theory, where one's intuition is their personal guide. Transendentalists didn't just accept society's morality, so how can a transcendentalist think his intuition guides all people?

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.

“But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied: “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.”

Here he speaks with a type of vanity which should put him on his guard. the problem with transendentalism as I see is it lies in the sin of pride. It teaches a way of discovering 'truths' dependant on no test and subject to none.

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

you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

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.

A man must consider what a blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity.

the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.

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 loth to disappoint them.