Personal Development
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most bracing essay in American literature, and one of the least comfortable. Emerson's position is that you already know what you think, that you routinely abandon it because someone more confident disagreed, and that you then encounter your own rejected idea years later in another person's work and have to admire it.
He is not offering encouragement. He is accusing you.
Written in 1841 by a former minister who had resigned his pulpit rather than administer a sacrament he no longer believed in, it carries the authority of someone who paid for the position he's arguing. Bring it the opinion you've stopped voicing.
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Society as a joint-stock company against the individuality of its members.
You already know. That's his claim, and his provocation.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide. He does not soften it.
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Self-Reliance is an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in his first collection of Essays in 1841, and the central statement of American Transcendentalism.
Its argument is that genius consists in trusting your own thought, that society is organised as a conspiracy against the individuality of every one of its members, and that consistency with your own past self is a trap rather than a virtue.
Emerson had resigned as a Unitarian minister in 1832 and spent the rest of his life as a lecturer and essayist. He was Thoreau's mentor and, in a different register, a direct influence on Nietzsche — who kept a copy and marked it heavily.
In its words
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
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