The Art of the Essay: "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages.

It is a deliverance which does not deliver.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself.

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church.

A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he.

A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything 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.

Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;—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.

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.

I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church.

Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing?

Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but 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.

It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes.

Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable themselves.

But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;—read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not.

Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris.

Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;—and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.

Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him.

That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic.

Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus?

What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded?

My willful actions and acquisitions are but roving;—the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and respect.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.

Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance?

Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it.

Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you.

We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation.

We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation.

In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows.

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.

Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature.

It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration.

His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property.

Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers.

The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex!