Emerson's Self-Reliance "Who so should be a man is a non-conformist." Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this great aphorism in his story Self-Reliance. In Self-Reliance, Emerson writes about relying on yourself to make it through life in society and not becoming too enveloped in society. Another aphorism that I like is, "The sky is less grand when it shuts down over less worth in the population." This aphorism is taken from Henry David Thoreau's Walden. In this piece, Thoreau writes about his experience of living in the woods. When Emerson wrote "who so should be a man is a non-conformist," he was saying that if a man tries to become like the things around him, he is less of a m