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
Arthur Helps the Bath in 1871 and a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the following year. He died of pleurisy on 7 March 1875. His first literary effort, "Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd" (1835), was a series of aphorisms upon life, character, politics and manners. One of these aphorisms is quoted by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, Chapter Two: "The Deep slumber of decided opinion." His "Essays written in the Intervals of Business" had appeared in 1841, and his "Claims of Labour, an Essay on the Duties of the Employers to the Employed", in 1844.