Self-Reliance, Essay Example

First Significant Quote

“Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet.”

My Insight

This  line lays out the essential establishment   of man’s capabilities before he venture beyond his means. This is crucial to self-reliance. A man must know his own limits before he can succeed. If he embarks on a journey that will end in failure because he has not correctly assessed his own limitations, then, time will have been wasted and a reiteration of self-awareness’s importance will have been more strenuously enforced as critical. It is much more important, he suggests, to change one’s abilities to be able to handle more. Any person who believes their problems will magically disappear or become rectified by a simple change of venue suffers delusions.  If self-reliance cannot be attain at the person’s current level of ability, then steps can be taken to garner more abilities.

Second Significant Quote

“And now at last the highest truth of this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition.”

My insights

While initially, the description may just seem vague. As far as a philosophical account of what he lived for, Emerson includes both essential means of living such as food water and air, and the substance that feeds the inner soul to fulfillment. These substances include a life that is utterly non-conformist in nature.  A person must be continually advancing to maintain proper self-reliance. Only through self-reliance can man truly be let down by others or fall short due to reliance on any other person.