Emerson & Self-Reliance

There is a sentence in Emerson's "Self-Reliance" that has been quoted so often it has become wallpaper: "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that i

In the spring of 1837, a twenty-year-old Harvard senior named Henry David Thoreau read an essay that rearranged his sense of what was possible. The es

In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay that would become the founding text of a tradition. "Self-Reliance" appeared in his first collection,

Emerson was not poor, and he did not pretend to be. When he resigned from Boston's Second Church in 1832, he walked away from a steady salary — but no

Emerson's most frequently misunderstood argument is his case against conformity. "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist," he wrote in "Self-Rel

In the winter of 1845, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train to deliver a lecture in a town he had never visited, to an audience that had never heard hi

Ralph Waldo Emerson published "Self-Reliance" in 1841, and the essay has been generating arguments ever since — most of them about whether its vision

On July 15, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson stood before the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School and delivered an address that would get him effecti

In 1841, the same year he published "Self-Reliance," Emerson published a companion essay called "Circles" that most readers have never encountered. Wh

On August 31, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson stood before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard and delivered an address that Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wou

In the middle of "Self-Reliance," Emerson drops a line that should stop every restless reader cold: "Travelling is a fool's paradise." The sentence is

In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." The conspiracy he descr