From Self-Reliance (1841) 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
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.
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 the Last Judgment. Familiar as the
voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and
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 faithfully 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 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.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour 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.
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.
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 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….
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.
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 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 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 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 window 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 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.
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."
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.
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.