Self-Reliance, standing up for your beliefs and to be willing to fight for what you believe .
Ralph Waldo Emerson's main idea in "Self-Reliance" is to show the importance of .
depending and relying on yourself. Emerson's essay self reliance is something we .
should follow our lives by. He encourages us to move toward nature rather than .
staying with what society tells us to do and to follow. .
Everything in nature is on track with God and when we move toward society's way of life, we cut ourselves off from the rhythm that controls all life. In the beginning of "Self-Reliance", Emerson tries to express his ideas on the subject in terms that we can all relate too with not so much difficulty. "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till" He is saying that we have come on this earth not to just sit around and do nothing. We have come on this earth to work hard and to earn and get what our hard work has earned us. .
Emerson, when he speaks about self reliance, he means that if we want to make it, and if we want to succeed, it must come from inside of us. It cannot come from anyone else. For Emerson, self reliance was more than the image of a family living out a life on the frontier. Even though he had a good attitude and he was delightful with nature, Emerson's frontier was a place of freedom and a place with opportunity. This was a mental landscape free from all of society's conformities. .