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The Triumph of Nationalism / The House Dividing: America, 1815-1850

Library of Congress

___Ralph Waldo Emerson___

SELF-RELIANCE
1841  EXCERPTS *

“Ne te quæsiveris extra.”*

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“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
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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.
1 I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not
conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The
sentiment they instill 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
Moses:
the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest Old Testament
merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books Hebrew leader
and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man Plato:
should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his ancient Greek
mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. philosopher
(4th-5th c. B.C.E.)
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 John Milton:
with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting English poet (17th-c.)
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, tomorrow 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.
...
3 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

*
National Humanities Center, 2007: nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/. Paragraph numbers refer to the full text of Self-Reliance. Some spelling and
punctuation modernized by NHC for clarity. Complete image credits at nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/triumphnationalism/ imagecredits.htm.
* “Rely only on yourself.” Persius, Satires, I, 7 (1st century A.D.).
 the absolutely 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, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and
the Dark.
4 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 sufficiently 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.
5 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, interesting, 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
Lethe: in Greek myth-
this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all ology, a river in Hades
pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, (underworld). Drinking
unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. its water would cause
complete forgetful-
He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not ness, i.e., the loss of
private, but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put all earthly memories.
them in fear.
6 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 shareholder, 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.
7 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 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. 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 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. 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 malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that

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 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 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. 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 thousandfold 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.
8 Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his
virtues. 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 extenuation of their living in the world—as invalids and the insane pay a high board.
Their virtues are penances. 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 privilege 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.
9 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.
10 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 communities of opinion. This conformity makes them

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 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.
11 For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know
how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders look askance on him in the public street or in the
friend’s parlor. 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.
12 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.
13 But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this Joseph: Hebrew
slave of the Egyp-
corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or tian Pharaoh who
that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems left his coat behind
to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in as he fled from the
seductive wife of
acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed the Pharaoh’s chief
present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied guard rather than
commit sin.
personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to
them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave Pythagoras
your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. & Socrates:
ancient Greek
14 A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little philosophers
statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has Martin Luther:
simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the German leader
wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what of the Protestant
Reformation
tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said (16th c.)
today.—“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 Copernicus,
Galileo, Newton:
Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise leading scientists
spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. of the Renaissance

...
22 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 center of
the present thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and
receives a divine wisdom, 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 center by their cause, and, in the universal

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 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 moldered nation in another country,
in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness 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 anything more
than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.
23 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 window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are;
they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every
moment of its existence. 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.
24 This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects David, Jeremiah, Paul: major Biblical
dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of figures—a Hebrew king, a leading
prophet, and an apostle of Christ
I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always and early Christian evangelist
set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like
children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames 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; 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.
25 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 accustomed 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 exclude 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.
26 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 confident 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,

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 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.
27 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. Nature 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.
28 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.
29 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, 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.”
30 If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us Thor & Woden (Odin):
at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake in Norse mythology, the
god of thunder and the
Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to chief of the gods
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 Saxons: Germanic tribes
that came to dominate
deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O Britain (with the Angles)
father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after as the Roman Empire
dissolved; thus Anglo-
appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto Saxon culture as the
you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have root of British culture
no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavor 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 myself 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;

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 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, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh today? 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 you may 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.
31 The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere
antinomianism; 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 fulfill 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 anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.
32 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!
33 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, desponding 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 ambition 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.
34 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 himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A
sturdy lad from New 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 nations, 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 revere him— and that teacher shall restore the life of
man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.
35 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.
[Essay continues.]

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