Self-Reliance and Other Essays

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essayist, poet and philosopher, argued for a transcendental idealism built on self-reliance, self-culture and individual expression, and the selection gathers six of his essays and one address. Alongside the title essay are Experience, The Poet, Friendship, History and The Over-Soul, drawn from his first and second series of Essays, together with the Harvard Divinity School Address. Self-Reliance itself urges each person to resist conformity and false consistency and to follow his own instincts; the essay supplies Emerson's line about foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds. Some pieces also hint at the skepticism that colored his later thinking.

Barack Obama counted Self-Reliance among his most influential favorites, according to a list drawn from his Facebook page and a 2008 New York Times interview.