"Self-Reliance" Passages
(First published in Essays, 1841)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)



To believe 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 which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

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 him to till.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

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 of securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our 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. . . . I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

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. . . . If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-Society, vote with the great party either for the Government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, --under all those screens, I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. . . If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.

For non-conformity, 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. . . . A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. . .


It is for want of self-culture that the idol of Travelling, the idol of Italy, of England, of Egypt, remains for educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination, did so not by rambling round creation as a moth round a lamp, but by sticking fast where they were. . . Travelling is a fool’s paradise.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but loses so much support of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. . . . His notebooks impair the 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 . . .

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is a want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem what they call the soul’s progress, namely 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. They measure their esteem of each other, by what each has, and not by what each is.