An Interpretation of the essay ‘Self-Reliance’, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hello,

This essay was recommended to me a few months ago, and my journey with it has been long but fruitful. I started interpreting the text paragraph by paragraph at first for myself, before realizing it may help others understand the great messages within. I have finally finished and now pass it on to you.

Enjoy

Find the original essay here :)

“‘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’”

Great people such as Moses and Plato are renounced for having disregarded all past rhetoric, and listening to their own. We discard our thought because it’s ours, but in the powerful messages of others we find those discarded thoughts. Believe in your truth, “else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

“‘There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance.’” Your work must come from your own mind and effort, “through his toil bestowed upon that plot of land…