Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Ne te quaesiveris extra.”

“Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune.
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox.
Power and speed be hands and feet.

SELF-RELIANCE.
I READ the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conven-
tional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment
they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. 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. Speak your latent
conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and
our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of
the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught
books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect
and watch that gleam of light which 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; they come back to us with a certain alienated
majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our
spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on
the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have
thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
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 to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and
none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing
one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in
the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that
it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea
which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faith-
fully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay
when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall
give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no
muse befriends; no invention, no hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found
for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so,
and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the abso-
lutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their
being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and
not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, re-
deemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

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 Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text 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. Their mind being whole, their eye is
as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody;
all conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play
to it. 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. Do not think the
youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is suffi-
ciently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold
then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.
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. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in
the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass
by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, inter-
esting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he
gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as it
were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat he is a
committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now
enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who
can thus avoid all pledges and, having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased,
unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,—must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all pass-
ing affairs, which being seen to be not private but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men
and put them in fear.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the
world. 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 share-
holder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in 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. He who would gather immortal palms must not be
hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. 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. I re-
member 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. On my saying, “What have I to do with the
sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?” my friend suggested,—”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.” 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 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. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and
sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If mal-
ice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful
cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him,
‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never
varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles
off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’ Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer
than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none. The doctrine of
hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. 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

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 Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
tell me, as a good man did to-day, 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. 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.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his vir-
tues. 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 or extenua-
tion of their living in the world,—as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are pen-
ances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that
it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I
wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a
man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference
whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privi-
lege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for
my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual
and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the
harder because 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.
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: and
of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you.
Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman’s-buff is this
game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his
text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that
not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation of
examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to
himself not to look but at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a
retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound
their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communi-
ties 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. 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.
Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We
come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There
is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I
mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at
ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but
moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable
sensation.
For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to
estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend’s parlor.

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 Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more
formidable than that of the senate and the college. 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.
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,
lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contra-
dict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely
even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and
live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the de-
vout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape
and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.
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. He may as well concern himself with
his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—’Ah, so you shall be sure
to be misunderstood.’—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 suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being,
as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it
matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;—read it for-
ward, 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. My book should smell of pines
and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or
straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills.
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that vir-
tue or vice emit a breath every moment.
There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their
hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are
lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage
of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it
straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your
other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done
singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right
and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right
now. Always scorn appearances and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the fore-
gone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and
the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories be-
hind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.
That is it which throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignity into Washington’s port, and Amer-
ica into Adams’s eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue.

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 Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap for
our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree,
even if shown in a young person.
I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted
and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife.
Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please
him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make
it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid content-
ment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all
history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true
man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He
measures you and all men and all events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat
else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the
whole creation. The man must be so much that he must make all circumstances indifferent. 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. A man Caesar is born, and for
ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his
genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened
shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of
Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called “the height of Rome”; and
all history Resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.
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 the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or 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
sculptured 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, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you,
Sir?’ Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and
take possession. The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims
to praise. 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 obse-
quious 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. In history our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and
lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and
common day’s work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why
all this deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear
out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned
steps. When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of
kings to those of gentlemen.
The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been
taught by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty
with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among
them by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not
with money but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they
obscurely signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust.
Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What
is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements,
which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence

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appear? The 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 Intuition, whilst all later teachings
are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their com-
mon origin. For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not di-
verse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obvi-
ously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which
things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their
cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth
man wisdom and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense
intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice,
when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence
this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its ab-
sence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his in-
voluntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err
in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed.
My wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving;—the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion,
command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of percep-
tions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for they do not distinguish between perception and
notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I
see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time all mankind,—although it may chance
that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.
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; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present
thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wis-
dom, old things pass away,—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and
future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it,—one as much as another. All
things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty and particular
miracles disappear. 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. Is
the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child
into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are
conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. 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 any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and
becoming.
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 win-
dow make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with
God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its ex-
istence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the
leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. 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
and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself unless he
speak 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 the sentences of gran-
dames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see,—
painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view
which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and are willing to let the words go;

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for at any time they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is
as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception,
we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with
God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that
we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition. That thought by what I can now nearest approach to
say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accus-
tomed way; you shall not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you
shall not hear any name;—the way, the thought, the good shall be wholly strange and new. It shall ex-
clude example and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed
are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In
the hour of vision there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over
passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and
calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South
Sea; long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay
every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and
what is called death.
Life only avails, not the having lived. 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. This one fact
the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty,
all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.
Why then do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be power not confi-
dent but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies
because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his
finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of
eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic
and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich
men, poets, who are not.
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into
the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the
measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much
virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight, are
somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of its presence and impure action. I see the same law
working in nature for conservation and growth. Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Na-
ture suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of
a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources
of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul.
Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the
intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the
invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and
our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.
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 urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better
than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct
or sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or
child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood
and I have all men’s. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being
ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At
times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client,

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 Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—’Come out unto us.’
But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a
weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. “What we love that we have, but by
desire we bereave ourselves of the love.”
If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations;
let us enter into the state of war and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon
breasts. 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. Say to them, ‘O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after
appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey
no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavour to nourish
my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,—but these relations I must fill
after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break my-
self any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot,
I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what
is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart
appoints. If you are noble, I will love you: if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical
attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my
own. I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, how-
ever long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what
is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us out safe at last.’—
But so may you give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their
sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of
absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the same thing.
The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere an-
tinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of
consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven.
You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider
whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog;
whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard and absolve me to
myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that
are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any
one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.
And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and
has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he
may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong
as iron necessity is to others!
If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of
these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, de-
sponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death and afraid of each other.
Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our
social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambi-
tion out of all proportion to their practical force and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our
housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen,
but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength
is born.
If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men
say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an office within
one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to him-
self that he is right in being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New

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Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a
school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive
years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast
with his days and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but
lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man and
tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of
self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the na-
tions; that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing
the laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the window, we pity him no more but thank and re-
vere him;—and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and make his name dear to all his-
tory.
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the 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.
1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave
and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign vir-
tue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous.
Prayer that craves a particular commodity, any thing less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the con-
templation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubi-
lant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. 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. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the
farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are
true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher’s Bonduca, when
admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies,—
“His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
Our valors are our best gods.”
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of
will. Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already the
evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly and sit
down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, put-
ting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our
hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide;
him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and em-
braces him because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him be-
cause he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him.
“To the persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals are swift.”
As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with
those foolish Israelites, ‘Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and
we will obey.’ 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. Every new
mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a
Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In pro-
portion 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. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are
also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man’s relation
to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in
subordinating every thing to the new terminology as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new
earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time that the pupil will find his intellectual power
has grown by the study of his master’s mind. But in all unbalanced minds the classification is idolized,

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passes for the end and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to
their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them
hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see,—how
you can see; ‘It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.’ They do not yet perceive that light,
unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it
their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will
crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-
colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.
2. 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. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable
in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours we
feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessi-
ties, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still and
shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom
and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet.
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. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not
carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra,
his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.
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. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to
be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I
go.
3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual ac-
tion. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel
when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the
mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our
opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts
wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an appli-
cation of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we
copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint expression
are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to
be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the
habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted,
and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. 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 extemporane-
ous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet
knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught
Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or
Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not bor-
row. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you
cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand
as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but
different from all these. 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

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same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and
noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.
4. As 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. 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. For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old
instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a
pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a
spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two
men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly,
strike the savage with a broad axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the
blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.
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 as 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-office increases the number of acci-
dents; 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. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater
men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first
and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail
to educate greater men than Plutarch’s heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is
the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class.
He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn
the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume and do not invigorate
men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accom-
plished so much in their fishing-boats as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted
the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of ce-
lestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curi-
ous to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery which were introduced with
loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned
the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered
Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor and disencumbering it of all aids.
The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Cases, “without abolishing our arms,
magazines, commissaries and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should
receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself.”
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same
particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make
up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.
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 es-
teem 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. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of
new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental,—came to him

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by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no
root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a
man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not
wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually re-
news itself wherever the man breathes. “Thy lot or portion of life,” said the Caliph Ali, “is seeking
after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” 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! The Democrats
from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a
new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon conventions and vote and re-
solve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method pre-
cisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be
strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask
nothing of men, and, in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the up-
holder of all that surrounds thee. 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, works miracles; just
as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.
So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel
rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of
God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter
out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return
of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are
preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you
peace but the triumph of principles.

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