“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…”
I ran across this Emerson quote in the ’90s, not in a text or class lecture, but as a significant line in the romantic comedy Next Stop Wonderland. 🙂
Other inspirational Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes, including the more context for the quote above, can be found below.
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“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
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“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
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“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
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“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. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
