In the Library
Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 45 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 10k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau went to the woods to live what Emerson preached, and the cabin is the essay made physical.
£1.99
Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau takes Emerson's philosophy of the individual and aims it at the state.
£1.99
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius practised self-reliance on a throne, and the Stoic discipline is the ancestor of Emerson's trust.
£1.99
About the book
Trust thyself, Emerson writes, and every heart vibrates to that iron string. Self-Reliance is the sound of a man refusing, line by line, to be smaller than his own conviction. The essay's genius is its aim: not the timid or the dull but the respectable conformist, the charitable joiner, the person so eager for approval that they have quietly traded away their own judgment and called it virtue. Emerson names that surrender cowardice, however gentle the motive, and insists that nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. The sentences arrive like struck flints, "imitation is suicide," "to be great is to be misunderstood," each one daring you to flinch. And then the trap: to nod along with Emerson is to find a new master to obey, the very failure he is warning against. The only way to prove him right is to close the essay and stop listening to him.