Self-Reliance Self-Reliance "Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow their own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emerson's most famous quotations: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." This essay is an analysis into the nature of the “aboriginal self on which a universal reliance may be grounded.” The first hint of the philosophy
The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter of Fools", which was published in 1962. In his review of the book in The Georgia Review in 1971, E.C. Bufkin wrote, "As a record of her thinking and feeling, the selections cover a period of almost half a century, and the book is a virtual cornucopia.” The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter is a book by Katherine Anne Porter published by Delacorte Press in 1970. The anthology includes critical, personal, and biographical essays; three sections of an unfinished work about Cotton Mather; book reviews; letters;